Psychopolitics: Psychology of Consumer Socialization [1, 3 ed.]

Citation preview

THE LOOT LOOP

THE LOOT LOOP Politics of Psychology in Consumer Society ADNAN SELIMOVIC

ADNAN SELIMOVIC, TEXT NIKI ASIMAKIDIS, GRAPHIC DESIGN MAX PERSSON, COVER ILLUSTRATION

Contents INTRODUCTION The Metropolitan Adolescent The Libidinal Economy of Gaming Towards a Politics of Subjectivity Overview of Chapters

11

16 19 27 33

CHAPTER ONE: SOCIALIZATION AS TECHNOLOGY IN THE REPRODUCTIVE ECONOMY 39 Socialization as Technology 45 The Entanglement of Subjectivity and Specie-ality The Real and the Imagined, the Ideal and the Fantasized 55 Towards the Role of Gaming in the Consumer Libidinal Economy 58 ISBN-13:978-1545431016 ISBN-10:1545431019 © ADNAN SELIMOVIC 2017 Original English title: The Loot Loop 1st edition Printed by CreateSpace

CHAPTER TWO: IDEOLOGY AS TECHNOLOGY IN POLITICAL ECONOMY

65

CHAPTER FIVE: FROM REIFIED TO COMMODIFIED PERFORMANCES OF SELF

159

Psychological Function of Ideology Reconsidering the Demands of Being a Consumer Subject Psycho-Politics of Consumer Technology The Player-Avatar-Subject as a Consumer Videogame High School

72

The Self-Conception of a Gamer as an Adolescent White Man The Attraction of the Open-World Games Life in the Loot Loop

161

Gender as Psycho-Technology A Routine Fantasy of Exploitation The Selective Operationalization of Gender Performativity in Loot Games Gender as a Domain in the Auto-Stimulating Machine

177

CHAPTER THREE: INDUSTRIAL APPLICATION OF PSYCHO-TECHNOLOGY

97

The Necessity of Fetishizing Small Differences in Loot Games The Reproducible Allure of the New

98

CHAPTER SIX: THE PSYCHO-POLITICAL CONSTRUCT Maladies of Consumer Subjectivity A Genealogy of the Transgenerational Sacrifice Into the Economy of the Spill-over Affective Terms of Gaming Surplus-Extraction The Disney Child

191

Exploitation of Psychic Surplus Boredom and Psychic Surplus

209

Interlude: the Emancipatory Principle Theories of Adolescence

217

Politics of Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination Adolescence as Class in the Age of Ouroboric Capitalism Psycho-politics and Responsibility Self-Consciousness as the Development of Private Language The Predicament of Consumer Adolescents

229

BIBLIOGRAPHY

255

83



The Anatomy of the Avatar-Subject Relationality The Nature of Commodified Identification The Principles of Psycho-Politics The Dawn of the Auto-Stimulating Machine On the Question of Addiction to Avatar-Subjectivity

107



CHAPTER FOUR: ADOLESCENT GAMING AT THE ADVENT OF PSYCHIC LABOR Confronting the Ideological Definition of Play The Metropolitan Consumer Class New Forms of Adolescent Labor The Extraction of Value The Question of Materiality Valorization as the Site of Exploitation

193

122

129 133 137

Acknowledgements I am indebted to everyone who has had to deal with me over the course of the years it took to push this book out. To my dear parents, your loss was my emancipation. To Ena, I hope to live up to all that you think of me. Thank you for the time you took out of your life to read, edit, and critique all the drafts. Special thanks to Shannon Bell and Gad Horowitz, John O’Neill, and Deborah Britzman, Jay Goulding, and James Block for helping me lay the groundwork. Lastly, I am grateful to Niki Asimakidis and Max Persson for dedicating their time and effort. There would have been no book without your help.

Introduction At the heart of the global capital lies the molten core of the consumer society. It is a crystal fortress, walled in from the sites of primary exploitation. The consumer society is also ideologically, structurally entrenched. It is so as to fortify the circulation and reproduction of itself. Thus, living in the center has its own schizophrenic class structure, with the consumer class, to which most of the society must belong at least in part, tasked with self-perpetuated consumption. Those deemed consumers have a very special relationship to this economy. The consumer has to be plugged in through the everyday as the key to the economy’s reproduction rests in everyday routine. We will need some obscure language to talk about how the economy extends into the realm of the psyche. The central term is libidinal economy, and it is a cover term to represent a whole system of interrelated processes that deal with conscious and unconscious flows constituting ones’ subjectivity—the quality of self-awareness as tied to the world it is grounded in, desires and fantasies, and most importantly, their own way of investing themselves into finding meaning in the world. The libidinal economy is (sometimes dialectically) intertwined with the political economy, which extends from the interpersonal to the global. For now, it is merely important to note

that the libidinal economy represents what is happening in the interiority of a subject as opposed to the political economy which engages with the relationality and exteriorities of that subjectivity. In the consumer society, a dominant form of the libidinal economy is established over the course of childhood with the family enforcing the general terms of defining the very basic selfself relation. An economy emerges in the process of a young person’s structuration through the magic of the everyday and routine. It is through those experiences that the young subjects learn to relate to their objects on the way to their selves. The exploitative drive of consumer capitalism has already achieved the capacity to realize models of subjectivity most suitable for its processes, one in which a person begins to valorize themselves into commodification, with increasing efficiency. And this subjectivity would necessitate a way of reproducing it. It is a historical fact that the consumer society was born of the Industrial Age, indebted to war, dispossession, and exploitation. As the competing political economic monopolies failed to secure their own reproduction, the consumer society emerged as the choice political economic structure for maximizing accumulation. It succeeded where others failed because it was underwritten by the momentum of the political valorization of technology in the earlier imperial eras. The tool, the horse, the gun, and the boat—technology enabled the kind of dispossessing violence that created the foundations for the world we now occupy. Digital technologies we now habitually use as means for socialization only appear to be of a different root. Intrinsically speaking, the consumer society burgeoned because it had discovered a source of value from within the ouroboros of consumer libidinal economy. The society would redefine the basic worth of a per-

son according to their capacity for participation in cycles of a specific kind of conspicuous consumption. The consumers would come to guarantee the safe reproduction of the system of economic exploitation by directing their libidinal economies along various institutionalized channels. As this society became increasingly organized around perpetual consumption, it also became fused to the necessity for compulsory reproduction of the capacity and willingness to engage in that sort of a process, and the capacity to keep doing it. An interesting point of departure is the link between the development of the drive and desire for simulation alongside that of the consumptive drive. The consumer society is perpetually (re)built on waste, or what must eventually always become waste—disposability, reproducibility, automation, repeatability, etc. In order to preserve the idea of scarcity and commodity value, a society sustained to prolong consumption had to ideologically camouflage the fact that it was built on waste. This is the primary role of simulation. In this context simulation (and sensory supplementing of real-life experience) begins to play a significant role in the general upkeep of consumption, the requirements to sustain an order of reproducibility. We live in a society of waste where everybody must still imbue things, people, ideas, and even themselves with value on the way and through their eventual obsolescence and discard. In such a life, there is a peculiar interaction between the larger political economy and the other personal, private, libidinal (psychic) and, naturally diminishing economy. In the sense that there is a structural relationship between the person and the world into which they are born, this book is about the consumer libidinal economy—the psycho-social relationality through which the consumer economy churns. This will be a discussion to bring the idea of the libidinal economy back into

12

Introduction

The Loot Loop

13

the realm of the lived historical experience. My sense is that somehow over the years critical theory has distanced itself from the piling complications in the lived experience of advanced consumer society. There are talks of ephemeral bodies, super structures and human nature, but not enough about the politically-operative concrete and its deep ties to the interior. When confronted with the demands of the task, it is no wonder that we have slowly shied away from the terrifying complexity of there being historically situated materiality that creates shared grounds for commonalities, social habits, and all the ideological structures that follow, alongside the presence of a subject, a consciousness that always exists in single instances, and finds a way to voluntarily submit to their repression. Under the guise of false consciousness the consumer society is producing a self-stimulating machine that will absolutely nullify the existentially upset consumer citizen. In this work my intention is to collate and bring together theories about what is happening in the psychic realm in advanced consumer society. The central mechanism of the consumptive system depends on a technically-enabled method to consolidate and standardize the systemically-upheld notion of value. In this case televisual technology guarantees a shared concept of valorization required by the market society. The standardization of valorization happens in the liminal space between the commodity and the idea—a sustainable resolution is found in the symbolic erasure of contradiction between value and its carrier— the a(n)esthetization of experience by supplementing it with simulations to underwrite the displeasure of work and time investment, so that we might plunge ourselves into yet another cycle. Such magic is made possible in the realm of the simulation. It is because of ideology that we do not tend to see the normalized objects—the mobile or the laptop

screen—as gadgets operating in a relation to this notion of simulation. Thanks to ideological lenses, consumer subjects are virtually blind to the contradiction between scarcity value and waste in the name of the regime of Reproducibility. I will revisit this topic later on, but I would like to take a moment to offer some words about the historical development of televisual technology. Digital, televisual, communication technology as we know it was already genetically indebted to its earlier (now quite banalized) technologies of the letter and the image. And the core discovery was the psychological and ultimately political power of mediation, hidden in the letter and the image. Consumer technologies are of special interest because they can and do mediate users’ relationship to themselves, to their objects of desire, their daily lives, habits of work and leisure, and, of course, others. In other words, through its mediating forms, consumer technologies structure internal and external processes between human beings and (imagined and real) objects in their lives. Naturally this applies for those subjects who adopt the gadgetized mediations into their everyday routines and habits of self-stimulation. In establishing and preserving this basic mediation of routine entertainment experiences, these technologies achieve the goals set up by ideology. Televisual, sensory and tactile technologies assist the consumer society in securing a stable, predictable, and reproducible population that will go on working and living to reproduce it in return for confidence in self-perception of enjoyment, achievement, and pleasures. Like children waking up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, all that consumers ask for is to hear the familiar lullaby of soothing reassurance that everything is alright, and the world is as they had imagined it before the nightmare of the real. As the story goes, once the relationship between the consumer and the econ-

14

Introduction

The Loot Loop

15

omy reach some sort of an equilibrium, the consumers received bodily stimulation, (projective) psychological engagement, and ideological satisfaction (more so a nulling). In return the system received its own reproduction, or at least perpetuation and compliance to its regiments of exploitation and extraction at the pace dictated by the finance capital’s stir of the consumer debt markets. As we will discuss shortly, their access point is in the mediation afforded by televisual technologies. Those technologies marketed as entertainment gadgets function to regulate the libidinal rhythms through the momentum of the everyday. The Metropolitan Adolescent By this point in the historical development of postindustrial capitalist society, we have whole populations for whom interaction with digital gadgets has become part of their everyday lives. For select groups, the line could be drawn even stronger to suggest that immersion in a televisually communicated world has become part of their habitual everyday circle. The example is too ordinary to recall instantly— working young people finding solace in gaming. We make these distinctions between casual and hardcore, healthy and addicted gamers, whereas it seems to be the case that this is a matter of spectrum, with an underlying incorporative psychology going unnoticed. Video games are an obvious example of how televisual mediation has become part of the everyday lives for the vast majority of particular publics. Instead of engaging in the debate around the goodness of gaming, I want to focus on the implications of young people coping with economic exploitation through televisual consumer products instead. This is not about blaming gaming for the maladies of consumer subjectivity. Instead the point is to explore how the new age makes sense in

light of what we know about libidinal economy and its interconnectedness to political economy. The young people who are in their mid-twenties at this moment have grown up in the age of media and consumer mediation the likes of which have not been seen before. They are banally known as the millennials, who have a preference for self-expression, socialization, technological know-how, hybridity, multiculturalism, ecology, etc.¹ The truth of the matter is that the millennials are only one visible instantiation of a class position shared across race, class, and gender boundaries. The millennials are a generation-turned-class primarily tasked with fueling the consumer markets, and particularly through the regular interpellative reinscription into shared symbols. They are subjects who have been assigned an identity of adolescence, trained to perpetually replenish their own self-motivating lack. Adolescence is not only a term of development and generationality, it is a term of power. Adolescence is a historically-constructed ideological conception for self-conscious human beings whose agency is rationalized as being in need of limitation, regulation, repression, and direction. Furthermore, youth and adolescents as concepts represent a possible autonomous Otherness—other than structurally incorporated or accounted for, not yet matured, not yet extensively complicit to the historical ways of the world. Yet, the critical arc in youth studies, and particularly subject-object oriented studies of technology, emerges only in view of emancipatory goals. Treating gaming as a site of socialization and subject formation challenges the existing social research on youth experience in consumer society. A clearer image of the means and terms of co-optation (what is being commodified and to what end) can have the effect of propelling a dialectical response to the psycho-social conditions that already unconsciously exist.

16

Introduction

The Loot Loop

1. See Fry, R. (2016).

17

By the end of this book, I will offer an alternate perspective on socialization that guards against the normalized subjugation of the radical newness of young people’s consciousness. But, the point is not to make youth studies more utopian. The point is more so that critical psycho-social theory of liberation requires a historically contextualized human subject. The metropolitan adolescent gamer is one such subject position—the case of the psychological lives of adolescents born and raised in the metropoles, the post-industrial market-nexuses of global capitalism. Due to the efficacy with which digital recording and popular self-representation have merged to document developmental instances in the lives of these metropolitan youth, social theory can renew its efforts in understanding the social experience and relevant politics, and take advantage of the opportunity to consider a living, politically relevant group caught amidst commodified transgenerational, psycho-dynamic shifts. A political critique of academic research enveloping youth, specifically adolescents and adolescence, is fundamental to discipline youth studies away from ideological confirmation towards responding to historically-situated problems facing subjects young and old. A critical dialectical engagement with how we constitute the subjectivity of these adolescents (in terms of their socio-historical placement and their developmental relationship with economic exploitation) directly affects how we construe their potential political subjectivity. In other words, critical theory must deal with the historical materiality of the subject. I turned to the cultural subject/object of adolescents, stuck under the iron dome, living under the reign of increasingly liquid capitalization, waiting—more specifically, the metropolitan, adolescent, male-identified gamer (because he is already the subject of extensive social research).

The ideological materiality of the subject is important because it qualifies the fact and extent to which there is a politics to the ongoing social reproduction. As you will see shortly, I thought it made most sense to talk about the present predicament of the gamer youth in terms of economy and agency, consciousness and ideology, self-determination and relationality. Also because ideology implies that the subjectivity is socially constructed, so it opens up to the point that its construction has an intention.

18

Introduction

The Loot Loop

The Libidinal Economy of Gaming There is a libidinal economy to the psychological investment by a player in the context of modern gaming— ranging from idle games played during slow, dead moments of the day, to the all-consuming open-world and massively-multiplayer-online (MMO) games. Teenagers have time, which they could spend on experimenting, testing boundaries, exploring values and personalities, forming habits of relating to objects. But instead they are more likely to spend their time outside the purview of the governing institutions on games—not on themselves or experience that will give back and make them more than what they currently are—naive, uneducated, lacking stable means to self-consciousness. In the universe of modern gaming, time is currency. From World of Warcraft to Candy Crush, the game utilizes time spent in the game, engaging in an activity as a means of valorization. Time makes sense in terms of labor theory of value, as play-labor (playbor). As time value in labor, it also functions as a currency in a much less often explored economy of habituation. Habituation in turn guarantees the consumption of what is produced. In this way the top and the bottom of the circuit is completed. In a twisted logic, the adolescent subject is enabled to become libidinally-conscious of his own labor-value

19

investment in an object during the socially-instituted hours of compulsory participation only to be given the ready outlet to denounce the whole edifice and settle for a private practice of labor-valorization in gaming to cope with the inescapability of the former. At this historical juncture, gaming is so commonplace, so popular among peer groups within communities that it is considered a culture. As such it serves an important part in human psycho-social relations— play, socialization of labor, finding solace in fantasy and role-playing. Why has this truncation happened in gaming? Why has it collapsed to such a basic common denominator? Perhaps, it is because of the aspirations of MMO and open-world games, in that the games reflect something about the state of ideology and its needs from its subjects. Not even game producers understand the magical gyroscope they seem to have stumbled upon. It has been a long way since the days of gaming being automatically associated solely with its predecessor, gambling. But in this history lies another uncovering towards explaining its current predicament. The magic is due to its psychological value—something about stimulating the mind of the subject stuck in a perpetual cycle of production and consumption. Gaming offers the means of making that life livable—making it easier to convince oneself that they are enjoying the repetition. At the center of the magic is the slip between play and labor, repetition and stimulation. This is where it might be helpful to return to the immersiveness of these games. My goal is to discuss this libidinal economy in a way as to argue that we need to deepen the political critique of technologies that coalesce into immersive, interactive experiences of stimulation and role-play in lieu of its political economic moment. In that spirit, when we look at the overarching message in commercially most-successful modern games, we encounter the centrality of repetitive work-

20

The Loot Loop

2. The flow theory dominates major game design theory discussions as the explanatory theory for achieving the optimum time investment in a game without exhausting the players. Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist credited with finding the theory of flow, says the following on the dangers of immersion: ...enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative effect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.' 'The flow experience, like everything else, is not "good" in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strengths and complexity of the self. But whether the consequence of any particular instance of flow is good in a larger sense needs to be discussed and evaluated in terms of more inclusive social criteria'. The question regarding flow is not only how we can make it happen, but also how we can manage it: using it to enhance life, yet being able to let go when necessary (1992, p. 24).

More generally, adolescence is a structural position, which also intersects with other structural-identity positions such as race, class, and gender. Without erasing female subjects who play games (and who perhaps therefore, in some measure, reproduce an image of “femaleness” through their role-play), more male-identified people game than do female, but our focus will be on the notion of middle-classness and whiteness. The development of a theory of masculinity and masculine performance in the ideational space of gaming is necessary; we shall return to this topic in Chapter 6.

based reward logics, simply called loot loops. The question no longer is whether to loot or not to loot; rather it has become a matter of how to balance the players’ expectation of the work/reward ratio. It is the essential question at the core of modern immersive gaming, and many marketing research dollars are spent trying to figure it out. And here immersive does not simply mean the achievement of a prolonged state of flow, the momentary loss of sense of time and self. It implies the achievement of a state of presuming to be another subject, and forgetting the life that exists outside of the game world’s fantasy through a combination of stimulation of senses and simulation of affect.² A loot loop is the smallest set of combinations of actions performed most often in the context of a game. The loop is a loop of activity. It usually involves a combination of movement and interaction. It is a praxis in repetition, and serves as the basic unit of labor in terms of progression through the game. The loop begins with a call to action, a ping that awakens the senses, and ends with a distinct experience of the reward or merely with the fetish of the sound of the reward. The combination of different attentions, the fixation into a single subjectivity through the perspective of the avatar, sponsored by the stressful moment of the loot loop, all of these elements work together to create the illusion of a satisfying experience where one’s labor matters, because it stimulates, but more importantly because it awards, and does so fairly. Too bad that the cost of the loot at the end of the loop is carried over into the waking life. As gaming becomes a habit of coping, the gamer subject is progressively looted of his experience of interiority as he continues to projectively identify with his subject condition through the ready-made gaming avatars. The territory where all of this takes place is in the very mediation of the avatar-subject relation in which the

Introduction

21

insecurities of the real subject are dealt with through the avatar. The character progression, the leveling up, each experience adds more value. It is all about the accumulation of value. Behaviorists go to great lengths to banalize the language around it, but the loot loop is the key to it all. Paralleling the valorization practices in the real world, by allowing for more libidinally equitable terms of valorization and laboring, the subject is enabled to self-medicate in light of the perceived impossibility of any consequential change—a repetition of the equation that guarantees valorization as long as the stimulation and the interpellation are correct so that the conscious mind can be kept away. What is so attractive or preferable to the loot loop is that all of the necessary resources are already there, internalized. Beyond conceptual reification, the game crystallizes a homo-economicus notion of valorizing labor—we submit to the labor cost of an action with relation to the value of the reward upon completion. Playbor is valued both bodily and ideologically—attention fixation and endurance of bodily stimulation create an impetus for valorization from within, while the reward values a player’s labor as always accounted in the material accumulation. There is an absolute gender and class component to this. As does whiteness, if whiteness is read as power, self-righteousness, conviction, steadfastness, natural sense of supremacy, heroism—whiteness as it self-interpellates in an ouroboric fashion. For instance, the hardcore gamer personality is a trace of a subject who occupies a very specific position in the consumer society. He has accepted the self-stimulating machine in the regiment of his everyday life, and in this way, has participated in behaviorally if not deliberately aligning his libidinal economic rhythms with those governing his life. This is what biopower 2.0 looks like. Under the prefects of the consumer society, a subject will perpetually re-

22

The Loot Loop

turn to submit himself unawares to unrewarding cycles of work for the economy as long as he can make up for the dearth of satisfaction in his personal time. *** The commodification takes places through both material and psychological incorporative mechanisms. In contemporary consumer economy these mechanisms function to create the suitable subjectivities necessary for capital’s reproduction. Modern video games represent one such mechanism of subject-(re)production. Their structural function is a kind of subject-creation that socializes a particular orientation towards consumption. Starting from a peculiar resemblance between the model neoliberal subject and the gamer, we will focus on the resonance from the relation between the person and gaming. In a sense, this is a political project to understand consumer capitalism from the vantage point of the people born expected to become self-valorizing consumers. The processes we have taken to be natural —such as self-relating, consciousness development, and socialization—are no longer just that. In consumer society it is the economy which predicates how we will nurture each other and cultivate the newer generations. At the intersections of critical theory, youth politics, and psycho-technology studies, this book attempts to refocus critical theory onto the fate of the adolescent subject growing up in today’s consumer society—always already in the process of being and becoming. To give you a sense of the larger problematic, allow me to narrate a cross-section I encountered during the early days of my research on the topic. In the winter of 2013, I began conducting interviews with white, working class and middle-class gamers in upstate New York. I met a group of young military veterans. They had two

Introduction

23

years in intensive special forces sniper training school in some remote part of the United States. As part of their training they were conditioned to internalize the necessary muscle memory for the job as well as the emotional logic through which they would see the job as meaningful, valuable, and even satisfying—the conventions of how the fresh body is disciplined by military industrialization. It came up often that the young snipers could taste their habit calling; they learned to crave the mark, to fantasize about the target and the releasing power of the trigger. When their training ended, these young men were deployed in combat. And as their story goes, after spending months guarding outposts, sweating in the desert without a single target, their tour was ended by an improvised explosive device striking their convoy. Each of them spent the next two to four years in rehab, only to then return to the metropole, the everyday American life, back to normality. On the occasion I would like to bring up, I was interviewing two of them on a night they regularly set aside for gaming. These were two prematurely retired young veterans (by this point in their thirties), over-trained and under-valued, the pride and joy of the American special forces—two millennals, adolescents-at-heart, who joined the military at the peak of their initial bloom of ideality.³ After a night of pharmaceutically sponsored meloncholia, they decided to turn on the Xbox 360 and play Call of Duty: World at War; specifically, the mini-game called “Nazi Zombies.”4 From the start the game invited the gamers to assume familiar orientations. They spoke as “we” in the same tone they evoked earlier while watching football——the mark that a teamplay psychology is being called forth through ideological utterances similar to those popular sports identificatory relations between fans and their favored teams.

24

The Loot Loop

3. Kristeva, J. (2007). 4. Activision (2008). 5. Immediately the theory of sublimation is relevant here. As the redirection of a desire/drive/potential initiative into socially manageable, innocuous, or productive expressions and objects, sublimation gives us a location at the intersections of psychology and technology. There is a concept developed by Marcuse to account for the ways advanced capitalist society is able to infiltrate and mobilize psychic (deep psychological) energy for social reproductive (that is, activities broadly assumed to be productive and consumptive) processes. The concept, is repressive desublimation, which suggests a ubiqutious, ephemeral, universalized historical political economy in which a person is subjected not only to social and filial regulation (at all those scenes of primary and secondary socialization— repression and desublimation), but also to historical economic institutionalization of psychosocial processes where the psychic flow is directed not just for release, but for release with future-attachment /conversion (and thus, profitability) potential.

6. On the level of auto-stimulation, the cycles of varying intensity of focus and multi-tasking simulate pleasure through its mechanism of immersiveness. Since the consumer economy operates most totally in the imperial center, the immersiveness is a mark of a historical positionality as well.

In any case, in this multiplayer “split screen” (the television screen is divided into two equal parts so that both players can see) first-person-shooter, players are on a team of soldiers, fashioned after Hollywood versions of American infantry from the early 1940s, fortified in a two-story building, windows and doors boarded up. The objective is simple and never-changing: survive the increasingly difficult hordes of Nazi zombies, who are trying to break through the barricades and swarm the players. The young veterans told me they enjoy the game because it involves increasingly complicated strategizing— the game is not just about endless, mindless slaughter. The game allows the young veterans to desublimate, to reclaim their internalized sense of agency and subjectivity cultivated during their training.5 They are to cope with the residual memory of being the ultimate soldier by playing out their fantasy of not only being the warrior but also the commander in the director’s chair. Having had their labor-libidinal economy shaped during exhaustive military training, it only makes sense that given the chance the young veterans would try to play out a fantasy that overrides precisely the point where the society had let them down. Through the game, it is finally their turn to command themselves. The fact that the objective is to kill swarms of Nazi zombies, the worst of two worlds, forms of historically inexcusable sociality and subjectivity, supports the immersion into the fantasy. It offers total purifying vindication, authorizing what they had been trained to become. In a sense it is wonderful to observe the crowning achievement of the modern society in action—the enabling of subjects’ participation in directing the flows of psychic investment and unloading. But, do we decide whether the repression or the chosen path of (de-) sublimation is “good” or even “good enough”? Why do

Introduction

25

we not judge the quality of its redirection, its surplus repression? Is it not important to ponder whether the repression nurtures or exploits the subject? As we enter the age of direct commercial and industrial manipulation of object relations through consumer technology, these are very important questions because on the one hand consumer technology is heralded as the enabler, the agency-creator, the liberator, but on the other, its economic role is designated as that of standardizing subjective desires towards a common denominator of the commodity at hand. In any case, this playing-out-of-a-fantasy-as-agame is not an isolated phenomenon. The entire media experience is deeply inculcated within the circuits of postindustrial consumer capitalism, especially in the realm of consumer technological gadgetry. It utilizes the likely libidinal registers of the historical social experience to immerse users into a reduced state of consciousness in which their self-awareness is operationally confined to rationality, which is limited to problem-solving and coupled with an elaborate complex of semiconscious or unconscious auto-stimulation (that is, bodily self-satisfaction).6 The totality of the experience is an instance of how technologically advanced capitalist social relations and economy has become. Technological mediation now lets loose the political material in the libidinal and emotional dimensions of subjective experience. In the historical centers of capital, the capitalist classes who sustain and live off of the updated versions of old means of exploitation, accumulation, and redistribution, reside in the innermost urban territories of the domestic sphere of the empire. Here gaming makes the horrifying hallmark of postindustrial metropolitan life—predictability and repetition—tolerable, if not, enjoyable. After all, when deep fantasies of satisfaction become fused within the commodity logic, all that is left

26

The Loot Loop

7. My conception of youth politics is based on Levinas’ concept of the Face. For Levinas, accepting an irreducibly self/Other relationship with everything that lies beyond the cover of the conceptual surface is symbolically represented in the irreducible confrontation with the surface of the Face. This conceptual limitation of knowing also constitutes a basic ethical and political lesson since Adorno, which becomes important the moment we recall the need for a critique of commodification to have a political stance. The concept of the Face serves as the base for politicality in the case of youth as a subject position in the complex of social reproductive institutions and capitalist political economy. For my work Levinas is important because his concept of the Face allowed me to construct a concept to stand in for the recognition and ethical treatment of otherness, which could be protected, that is, politicized. That concept is ownness, the other side of the Face taken from the perspective of the subject-in-their-otherness.

to do is find a way to retain the feeling, to return to the source of the experience, to repeat. Towards a Politics of Subjectivity The sight of the adolescent-gamer is a legible instance in the historical-material situation of metropolitan persons, who are fixed in the position of reproducing consumption through the way they perceive desires born out of institutionalization as their needs that routinely require quenching. My intention is to present adolescent gaming as a way to clarify the political issues at the intersection of social reproduction, capitalist political economic exploitation, psycho-social relationality, and the concrete (embodied) experience of libidinal economy and subject-formation. This is about the dawn of the commodity-subject, which signals the new expansion of the means for appropriation of dynamics and objects that originate in human sociality and become valorized in capitalist economy. The realm in which this process is seen as politically formative I have thought of as youth politics. Specifying politics of youth is important because considering the consumer-socialization-based political economy from a perspective of existential solidarity with youth opens up to a conceptualization of autonomy and selfconsciousness as essential political categories for politicizing the psychology of gaming.7 I seek the intersectional frame-work in which we can rediscover the place of the politics of the qualitative—the politics of quality of leisure, quality of pleasure, work and entertainment, its relation to self-consciousness and self-consistency. This might appear as a quixotic reading in critical theory, but I believe that at some point we have to ask whether any democracy that does not grant individuals access to the realm of production of their own self-consciousness is nothing but an ideology serving to manipulate us for some tertiary and perhaps wholly

Introduction

27

alien productive end from which we are never guaranteed any real benefit. The most basic kernel of exploitation must be critiqued. Gaming is inculcated, invested, and inherently imbued by the metropolitan adolescent consumer populations—the millennials are the carriers of the consumer society in the same vein that the baby boomers were the early-adopters. This is a different understanding of adolescence—it demarcates people for being born into the culture of self-valorization, who have an uneasy relation to sociality, work, and themselves, in big part thanks to the fact that their mediated lives lived on screens stimulate and satisfy much more meaningfully. Adolescence here is then characterized by an opulence, a connection to a primary narcissism, even if it is through repressive means. The instinct to feel closer to one’s life is the same impulse that leads to creative work and self-expressive work, to philosophy and poetry, to politics; that instinct is the same one caught in the loot loop. It is a complex consisting of a desire to thrive, to be stimulated into a singularity, to be excited and surprised, to matter and to be a mover in the world of meaning-making. This would be a particularly interesting population to consider in terms of transformative, radical consciousness beyond the status quo’s dictates of efficiency and productivity in the name of capital and work. Unfortunately there are no grounds for this kind of romanticizing. What we are seeing instead is the liberalization of basic investment from the traditional vestiges of the folk and the lore, to the point that other people or even ethical ideals become just sets of potentially stimulating objects in a sea of catalogues. Interestingly enough it seems that the metropolitan adolescents are indeed imbued by a proto-revolutionary anti-productivity stance. But, at the same time, their radical agency is nipped in the bud by their dependency on the reality supplementing or altering mediative gadgets,

which collect, control, and dispense just enough stimulus for people to choose immersion over the fate of their conscious lives in the real. If we begin with a definition of politics that includes (im)personal relations of power vacillating between ideological and material dimensions, then we ought to address how politics manifests in the realm where psychological being meets consciousness. Psychology is the realm of psychic materiality and its necessary connections to embodiment and economy. It is also the realm of consciousness, that basic tenet of political subjectivity in democratic society—self-awareness of being a person, a human being with rights and liberties, an autonomous individual. In the way that psychology harbors self-consciousness, it parallels how the libidinal is constrained to the economy of historically-conditioned embodiment. This is another way of saying that ideology economizes consciousness via the symbolic and the familially-trained (internalized) series of misrecognitions and misdirections. The misdirection is often ignored because the status quo presumes that the whole endeavor always already has a socially reproductive purpose. What is missed is the political dimension altogether. A person is trained to relate to their world through the historically specific objects with which they grow. And, in consumer society, with the economic impetus to organize how a person desires, consumes, depletes, and reproduces, we cannot afford to presume that the social and the economic will stay aligned, nor that their conjoining will promote the development of an autonomous self-consciousness in the already subjugated. There are two additional observations pertinent to undressing the political nature of this psycho-political perspective. The first is that identitarian concepts police the subjugated—youth and adolescents; the second, gaming plays an increasingly normalized role in youth socialization in the metropoles, even though its

28

Introduction

The Loot Loop

29

critical academic literature continues to wane in the breadth of its scope. It might appear that these are fairly esoteric points to introduce at this juncture, but to this day there are no psycho-technological considerations of gaming, let alone any political reading of some such engagements between the not-yet-people (the minoritized, the youth) and consumption-geared apparatuses of the capitalist political economy.8 This problem is further exaggerated by the fact that critical theory seems to have abandoned the project of liberation or exposing the incorporation of the libidinal economy. There is no coherent, explanatory or even descriptive political framework for considering psycho-sociality (as captured in discourses like object relations), socialization, and the very real, existential price of subject constitution for any one person. This I will envisage as a politics of youth, where consciousness is a determinant central category, because I believe that without such a historical material and psycho-socially concrete treatment of the political-ideological-libidinal economy, we inevitably continue to be stuck with the surface treatment of applying critical reflection to the historical materiality of the human condition. In a serious manner, then, the present discourse deals with the oldest question in political and social philosophy—the relation between the person and the society, the needs of the self and the social (even if not oppositional), the politics of the line drawn between desire and industrializing repression. In the traditional conservative view (predating the consumer society), repression of a young person’s growing into their world is justified by the needs of the society. Desires and fantasies, which encounter resistance and/or appear incompatible with the psycho-social reality of the subject, are drawn inward to prevent them from becoming directly expressed for the sake of socialization, reproduction, or productivity. Repression is thus twofold: in the first instance it

30

The Loot Loop

8. The Invisible Committee’s the Coming Insurrection (2009) comes closest to a critical politics of youth under advanced capitalism, especially when it is read along with the Cybernetic Principle (1999) and the Theory of the Young-Girl (2001).

is a “natural armoring” that comes about during early childhood development; in the second instance, repression is the price of sociality, the direct consequence of historical social conditioning of the human in the process of forming a socially productive subjectivity. In our current predicament, the problem is that we are being tasked to reproduce the consumer society on the back of our libidinal economies. As this task is situated in the life-cycle of late capitalism, the presiding organizational system also demands the continual ramping up of efficient exploitation, which is secured through the behavioral predictability—standardization and anticipatable consumer behavior—enabled through the mediating technologies. Consumer capitalism necessitates individuated subjects to be driven by their libidinal economies, but always already to preformed, consumer objects. We cannot be ourselves and the same as everyone else without a point-by-point compromise, which has been presumed to be unconsciously developed like a “body without organs.” When we see digital technology as a form of psycho-technology, then we can see how choices are being made to secure profits at the expense of selfhood. In the snapshot of the young special-forces gamers, we can glimpse that in this world even ideology becomes a technology of symbiosis as identifying and remembering become re-accessible in televisually-mediated avatar-self relations. This sort of a relation requires a hard filter between the person and the economy that will guarantee the alignment of the two. That filter is ideology. Capitalism as a political economy sustains an ideology—a notion of a culture and a subjecthood, a notion of the person and his sense of self, which work together for the economic system. Ideology surfaces whenever individual persons think of themselves, narrate their place in the world, or rationalize their relation to the larger power structures operating in the society. As these reflections often

Introduction

31

happen in the context of an emotionally charged situation, it is safe to say that ideology serves to consolidate the emotional and the symbolic economies as it allows a person to have a sense of belonging to a world they cannot see. It also appears in the experience of gaming in which a person accepts the technical terms of the relation to the game world. In other words, ideology, studied as a structure and a materiality, is a symbiotic relationship (or at least a compossibility) between the larger system and a person’s self-constitution. The claim is that the very processes of ideology are operationalized to train a person to self-commodify. It will be helpful to unpack the findings of the existing literature on addiction to gaming and social media, which focuses on “psychological” categories like motivation and addiction, but fails to offer any substantive meditation on the political consequences of the phenomenon under observation. Both motivation and addiction are emotional involvements, and as such, when read through the lens of exploitation, the phenomena are exposed as having a role in perpetuating voluntary participation within the extractive and consumptive mechanisms. It is my conviction that a politics, a notion of subjectivity, and an ethics of theoretical conception make up the foundations for an engaged critical theory of consumer youth socialization and the multi-dimensional economy that envelopes the process. After all, socialization is a collection of structures under a larger banner of social reproduction; as such it is a transgenerational reproductive economy. This point is important to distinguish the familial from the political economy, and thus to be able to use the object-relations theoretical lenses appropriately according to context. We encounter directly political critique of historical structures and the patterns of social reproduction in

Overview of Chapters My goal is to propose how engaged studies can benefit from critical theory, away from ideological presump-

32

Introduction

The Loot Loop

the specificity of the means of economization. These become political processes we often glance over as socialization, whereas they are really forms of psycho-technology (technologies of socialization and subject formation) no longer beyond the reach of industry. My interest is in considering the intergenerationality of political economy, a politics in which the question of youth and their otherness is crashed into the structuration of political economy and social reproduction within it. In the academic discourse of gaming is where we should expect to see such critical confrontation, because it seems to be pretty obvious that gaming is supplanted by adolescent consumers, and only particular types of games and gamer-subjectivities dominate the gaming landscape. But, instead, what we see is an almost single-minded preference for celebrating the gaming industry. Perhaps this is because finance capital has long stressed the cultural producers to provide the ideologically soothing reproduction by hailing to the all-encompassing promise of (consumer) technology. There is a politics signaled by the changing role of play in advanced consumer economy, where at the site of gaming, through controlled bursts of traumatization and regularization, prediction of subjective experience is commodified to feed the global capitalistic circuits. Even more alarmingly, gaming comes to assume an institutional role in the economic shaping of a growing, blooming young person’s quality of self-consciousness. Hence, my focus will primarily be on an instance of immediate mediation—the avatar-subject relation at the center of first person shooter, open-world, and roleplaying gameplay.

33

tions masquerading as normative understanding. We cannot afford to continue to assume that institutionalization and economizing of libidinal life are inevitable occurrences that have always existed and will always persist beyond the realm of politics. Gaming is only an instance of a larger effort to exploit the socializing structure of youth culture. As such it deploys increasingly intelligent means of capturing the life of the metropolitan adolescent for the sake of its own profitability. But also in doing so, it consolidates the interests of social reproduction and political economic reproduction. The first chapter will take up the generationality of becoming a person in a society and an economy. Working from the family outwards, the chapter will politicize the discourse on the transgenerational reproductive economy. It will explain the focus on gaming as the consumption-friendly liberalization of what passes respectively as acculturation and socialization. The chapter will reinscribe psychological processes of secondary socialization as becoming the direct means of economizing. The second chapter will focus more intensely on the materiality, the concrete experience of gaming. In considering the phenomenology of gaming, it will become a turning point to see consumer technology as a primarily mediating technology. This concept of mediation will highlight the fact that activities such as reading texts, listening to music, watching a film, composing an email, playing a video game, all require the user to accept their experience to be mediated by consumer technological gadgets that, in return, organize, reduce and represent signs, sounds, and images of historical sociality. In this sense, video games are different from older mediums because of their gadgetized mediation, but also because of their surplus-extractive purpose. By qualifying it as gadgetized, my intention will be to tie

psycho-sociality to technological commodities—the tying of self-relating object-relations to technological objects; the growing presumption of mediational benevolence of consumer technology. With a working conception of exploitative psychotechnology, in chapter three we will turn to the World of Warcraft as the categorical example of the new generation of video games geared towards creating more satisfying alternatives to the real world that still abide by the real world rules. MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) and open-world games will thus be seen as sightings of the emerging institutions of requisite consumer socialization and reinforcement—as a specific psycho-technological consumer apparatus. The fourth chapter will take the psychological relations between the avatar and the subject established in the previous chapter, and inscribe the occurrence in the larger political economy. In this effort, the chapter will take up the ideological differentiation of labor and play (as gaming) that metropolitan adolescents must undertake. Out of a discussion of various theories of play that avoid the question of labor, the chapter will work towards an argument about the exact place of emergent exploitation. In the fifth chapter, the libidinal life (chapter three) and the political economic register of play-labor (chapter four) will be brought together on the back of an embodied subjectivity at the intersections of race, class, and gender. The chapter will offer some clarifications, but also further problematize what the person identifying with a subjectivity expects to get from the relationship. By reading the historical positionality of the gamers identifying with white-male-middle-classness, the chapter will critique the surface treatment of race and class in gaming, and more importantly offer an understanding of how and why the dominant forms persist.

34

Introduction

The Loot Loop

35

The last chapter will address the crucial question about the emerging political economy in which the life of the metropolitan adolescence is situated. The crucial question—what kind of surplus is being extracted in this psycho-political economy—is entertained in this chapter. Surplus will be a crucial concept at this juncture, because the claim is that consumer technology works to secure the extraction of some sort of surplus value. After all, in a capitalist economy, surplus is the value the consumer (or the worker of the previous age) is unconsciously handing over to the capitalists for recapitalization. As the left-over, the spill-over, the remainder, the not-yet-exploited, the still-useless, the unaccounted-for, surplus in its ephemera valorizes the dead object of commodity. When we converge the libidinal economy of adolescence, the historical material conceptualization of gadget-mediated consumer-subjectivity formation, and the ideological needs and apparatuses of embodying such a stance, we can outline the psycho-political economy of adolescent gaming. And more importantly, we can pinpoint what kind of surplus is being extracted. This is where I return to the question of youth politics, and read the gaming libidinal economy and subject formation through those political lenses. The discussion also meditates on the changing nature of rule-breaking and the familiar paradox of consumer subjectivity in which video games substitute real freedom with closed-circuit, alienated agency. Moreover, the concluding chapter will present the political and theoretical implications of interpellative psycho-technology; it specifies adolescence as a subject position and consumption-reproducing ideological subjectivity as a class position. Culture is an amalgam of social and object relations in which youth insurgency (that is, their capacity to enact change) is usurped. Therefore, it is very impor-

36

The Loot Loop

9. Some historical examples of this happening are in Lacan’s (1977) gendering of most constituent parts of the inner world, Derrida’s (1995) final words on the inescapability of consumption, Freud’s (1997) mechanism of cathexis and libido, Butler’s (1997) conclusiveness of primary identification, Marx’s (2011) fixation on labor, Marcuse’s (1974) reification of sexuality.

tant that we ask how it is that culture is repurposed as capital in postindustrial consumer society’s Western (post)colonial centers—the metropoles. Any claim to a truth in the psychological realm is always already bound to the reigning ideology.9 The system defines value and actualizes the hierarchy of valuation, privileging some psychic energies over others, deciding on the sought after character of the not-yetgrown. In the case of metropolitan youth and gaming, we get to study exactly where idealism meets dialectical materialism (autonomy, political of consciousness in theory of subject formation). But, we also get to see how culture is commodified, how it gives content and shape to interpellation, and how interpellation is commodified as avatar-subject relationality. Even further, we get to see how gaming already functions as an ouroboros-like apparatus with specific economically interested agendas and definitions, which depoliticizes revolutionary potential in youth as a world-historical class.

Introduction

37

Chapter One Socialization as technology in the reproductive economy

1. Prosumption is a term recently deployed in marketing literature on gamification (that is, transforming everyday banal processes like online-banking and online-shopping into game-like experiences that bring about their own experiential satisfaction), and is meant to capture the fact that the act of consumption is the same as the bedrock of production when it comes to the kind of value created and extracted in circuits of social media and other online commercial contexts.

Capitalist society ought not to be assumed true or just to the nature of human sociality. We need a political reading of being young to see that the subjectivities caught up in the adult culture of the imperial consumer society cannot pose an encompassing critique of deep commercialization of everyday life. No authority or socialization model is ahistorical; they are always intertwined with and serve to stabilize the needs of a given political economy. Socialization, then, at best dictates the ideology of what is then relegated as the common way of perceiving reality. Rather than contemplate the emerging consumer-techno-socialization trends as a lack of parental authority or traditional source of value, we should ask what this emerging economic institution of socialization mobilizes. What subjects does it form and promote? And, how is the adolescent incorporated in the mechanism of consumption and prosumption?¹ In the context of consumer capitalism, a political critique rests on our ability to politicize attention-formation and other specific processes of psychic relations. Stiegler offers us psycho-technology as a concept with which we can re-view banal, routine activities in which we unconsciously rely on an object to relate to ourselves (objects imaginary or real). Stiegler suggests that attention-formation has a dual function in the life of the per-

son.² In the first instance it cultivates the person’s ability to narrativize himself. He is enabled to conceive of himself as a coherent subject. At the same time, attention draws the person’s intentionality towards specific socially-valuable (ethical or even nationalistic) narratives. Secondly, the process captures the immediate focus of the person, which allows for more immediatelyeducational priming. Stiegler offers the act of reading and a simple game between an elder and a young child. Reading draws a person’s attention towards social-productivity—the mind interprets signs to create internal parallels to ideologies in text, while intergenerational recreation allows for smuggling of generational relation-formation that train the person to be a grounded, experienced, rule-abiding social actor. This habituation is a kind of a psychological technology. Until now it has been largely presumed that there is no need to create panic about the privatization of the basic psycho-technologies—even though theories of socialization have long documented how a person’s attention can be directed towards predetermined goals. But, over the course of this book, it will become apparent that the predetermination itself should be the point of contest. The consolidation of the libidinal economy with the consumer political economy is socially valuable only if it provides lessons to be smuggled into the person’s habitual mode of social operation. Generally called sublimation, the operation has to happen without a person’s explicit knowledge, or the complication of his outright consent. Through series of such processes, psycho-socially resonant experiences prepare him to become a member of society that can be entrusted with (re)productive responsibility. He must internalize desires to (re)produce despite his consent. Whatever the psycho-physiological development of personhood might actually explain the phenomena of middle-class adolescence in late 20th century,

40

The Loot Loop

2. Stiegler (2012).

the developmental limits assigned to youth in fact define what we as a society allow to be done to human beings on the way to becoming legible social actors. When the society accepts the minoritization of certain persons, economic exploitation of their subjectivity withdraws from publicity—if it is accepted that adolescents are prone to be immersed in fantasy, selling them fantasy becomes socially acceptable even though doing so would have consequences for that generation of youth exposed to the commodity fantasy during their formative experiences. Understanding this process is critical in proposing a political reading of youth in idea and subjectivity. After all, the ways in which a society totalizes itself inside a person’s mind shape youth’s own experience of subjectivity. At the same time, this process harmonizes the subject’s self and social world in accordance with the particular form of social relationality (itself determined by social-historical and political-economic structures). We have a socioeconomic and historical-generational location of our adolescent subject. Because the metropolitan adolescent person holds a subject position within the status quo of the consumer society, the position must be theorized simultaneously within two economies: 1) a libidinal economy in which the adolesc-ent’s psycho-social experience is crafted to facilitate the development of productive habits, subjugation, and exploitation. And 2) an ideological economy of political standardization within which a young person develops both an image of himself as a subject and a particular embodied orientation to his subjective experience. Most of the time what goes by the name of socialization is either repetition, behavior modification by impulse control, or productive habit formation (that is, sublimation). As soon as we recognize the fact that socialization is always already historical, and that it performs its functions through concrete objects, we are

Chapter One

41

ready to consider the psycho-political implications of the bloom of the consumer society. Take for example the way in which parents regularly cultivate their offsprings’ relation to white sugar: for a time candy is presented as a reward, and children are explicitly taught to fetishize them as treats, as rare, exotic objects attained as for putting up with social demands. To this eroticized object their attention and access are externally regulated, because the treats are directed (or socially-valued) towards a productivity. In other words, the stake of social reproduction is instilled into a child’s habit of relating, in this case his association of sugary treats with compliance to external demands, despite his developing consciousness. The transgenerational historical economy deals with regulation and limitation of consciousness for the sake of the political economy (as an ideological sense of social reproduction). This line of thinking is relevant to the generational experiential difference amongst the subjects of technologically regulated consumer society: growing up with gadgets, being a ‘digital native,’ is different than having learned to use them later in the course of one’s lifetime. In the latter instance the person comes to find out that there are quicker ways of doing things, having been socialized according to the object-relations of their preceding traditional psycho-social (psycho-economic) economies, whereas the digital native experiences simulations, the virtual, and all of its prosthesis as parts of the psycho-social structure of his very subjectivity. The major critical trends in theorizing human psycho-social development and subject-formation roughly point to the same dialectical problem of liberation from historicity—that is, once we pardon all those greats for their own ideologies. In the process of defining the person according to physiological development, milieu, etc.,

a consolidating layer of sediment begins to accumulate, in which what really happens is the ideological rationalization of a person’s progressive subjugation to dominant forces. It is on this level that the double-bind, which can be argued to be the grounds of youth politics, operates: every person, in seeing themselves as subjects, must also see themselves as self- and socially-valued operatives. Therefore, when studying youth, families as one among units of social reproduction must also be considered as they function (with increasing complicity) within a system organized for economic exploitation, which in this particular case is material-consumption. When the matrix of relationality is apparent, autonomy can be theorized outside ideological conceptualizations of human personhood. To what extent particular concepts of subjectivity are biological or unchanging is up for debate, but the point stands that withholding the judgment that asserts perfect knowledge of the make-up of the internal universe will open up the critical space for unanticipated alterity. The point is not a utopian, but a theoretically responsible one. By forestalling the naturalization of these psycho-social processes, we can begin to reflect upon psycho-politics—that is, the politics of the psycho-social development of the human condition. As subjects under domination, persons choose ideology as a means to an end. Both consciousness and unconsciousness are involved in the process—there is a libidinal rationality at play. Ideology enables every person to live within themselves, to endure despite the limitations on their self-consciousn-ess imposed by economized relations. Given the extent of the technological incursion of consumer economy into the everyday lives of its publics, more than ever before we have the legitimate grounds to politicize this domain of human psychology where

42

Chapter One

The Loot Loop

43

a person’s relation to himself develops as an amalgam of various embodied subjectivities. We can begin by complicating the ideology and structural role of socializing agents, or that of the ethos of repression and productivity.3 To go on this journey together, it requires that we make many of our everyday concepts alien. Before making digital technologies look strange enough to critique anew, it is central that we estrange something even more primary—the social, its interjection into the human, the idea of being and becoming a person, its value and sanctity. For the contest of the televisual, and particularly the dawn of modern gaming in which a person adopts psychologically meaningful attachment to objects of commodified fantasy, it becomes crucial to work with a framework that covers socialization, subject-formation, and self-consciousness. Fragments of present and future social and object relations of young people have already become valuable markets in the political economy. Take the particular way in which children’s social landscape is already presumed to be commercialized. Children do not have the requisite for cultural reproduction. They do not have the sense of group-think, peers who self-reflexively motivate their peers to produce cultural objects. Adults and even adolescents to some extent have this capacity to produce their own signs, but children, who are perhaps going through their formative experience of socialization, are provided with symbols and rituals conjured up by others. The trajectory of experiencing the world becomes predetermined the moment children are handed toys, those familiar objects for identification and sublimation, produced in the image of what the adults, the agents of reproduction, want. And all that has to happen for this silent cabal to play itself out is for everyone to assume that the standard measuring stick does in fact apply—that youth need

44

The Loot Loop

3. Contrary to popular belief, we do not need to have a theory of the total geography of the human mind to do so. Instead we need only a theory of how the psychological life is constituted as an event. The opequeness of subjective psychic constructions can be offset by attending to the relationality between the subject as self-constituted and self-understood, and the object of fixation (which can be either imaginary or real). The theory does not have to be perfect. But it does have to have fail-safes built into its procedure. Object relations overcomes mystifications particular to the Freudian psychoanalysis by focusing on the most elementary analytic categories of the subject/ object relation. Even more importantly this theoretical framework lends itself to being linked to social and political dimensions of subject formation (such as interpellation and commodification). The concepts such as projective identification and internalization, which stem from this theory, frame the dynamic relationship between subject and object in a way that lends itself to extending the trace of the process into higher realms of human existence.

stimulus ‘congruent’ to those of the adults in perspective and quality of experience (more on this in the next chapter). In the name of fostering commercial feelings and behavior—that is, becoming predictable reproducers of desire, habitual consumers, repeat costumers— televisual consumer gadgets such as gaming consoles and personal computers (which open up to serving multiple psycho-social dimensions under the guise of social media and the like) are far from being disinterested enterprises. They are borne of capitalism driven by the organization of value-extractive means towards greater efficiency, extracting value from life, and, as an even more profitable side-effect, soliciting active participation in further commodification. Televisual commercialization needs to be fully considered as an apparatus of socialization in order for its political structures to become visible. But, in order to do this work properly, we must first address socialization as a dormant, whitewashed technology of creating linked, stable, reproductive subjects. The social reproductive process we know as filialization or generational hierarchization of people within a given community needs to be understood in the same context as the political economy, because it is already a socialized libidinal economy. Socialization as Technology If commodification exploits the reified, then sociality should already count as an economy. We need to have a sense of the more ephemeral social economy in order to read the treatment of the human psychology in the consumer society. The politics of socialization can become clearer in the context of the controversies around habituation. Habits of self-conception are historically grounded in culture, and culture exists within structures and institutions of social and political orders and economies.

Chapter One

45

Thus, socialization and trans-generational social reproduction as mechanisms of habituation can be conceived of as forms of technology that reach across the psychological and the social domains. Foucault is among the few who recognized the immensity of approaching socialization as technology. Speaking on the topic as “technologies of the self,” Foucault located the technology in the daily habits of a person’s relation with psychic and material objects that frame the way he approaches thinking as himself (his everyday self-consciousness). He argued that culturally and historically specific habits of self-narrativizing are methods for particular production of the self within an already existing political economy. In his words: As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these “technologies,” each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.4 Foucault’s theory of how particular lenses of self-consciousness are socially encouraged is useful as a way to draw out where the political economic interests overlap with the social-relational ones. In the context of the political economy, the daily energy it takes to maintain

46

The Loot Loop

4. Foucault (1988), p. 14. 5. Foucault’s notion of self-producing technology goes as far as the formation of the habit to think about oneself in a particular routinized manner. Popular historical practices of relating to one’s body and one’s sense of being in a body result in specific conceptions of the subject, which are mimetically tied to the political economy. The cultural habit of journal keeping in Roman culture served Foucault as one of his primary examples, because this habit reinforced a notion of subjecthood by drawing habitual attention to the state of recording the body’s health. The ubiquitous relation to smartphones and mediated interpersonal communication would be the obvious examples from our time. In this way the private moments of daily reflection become culturally channeled to reflections on the state of the body, which rationalized the reduction of the possibility of self-conception to the territoriality of body, that is, the idea of the self as property. There is a politics to mimesis. In the realm of idea-formation, the realm of consciousness and ideology, the concept (what becomes the commodity form as soon as it enters history) is in itself a historically grounded technology. For Adorno, concerned with the fate of the mimetic experience under the reign of the culture industry, a concept, a word (or a representation) becomes a technology, because it enables a person to deal with an object in an alienated manner——the distance from the object allows for his cultivation of agency.

Adorno viewed this concept as a problem, because subjecthood (self-awareness or consciousness) is deeply invested in the very life of the concept. Having a tendency towards perpetual colonization of experience, conception formats the qualitative relation to experience as a representational mediator, which, in its accidentalness, (re)produces consciousness. Adorno (1983), p. 79.

one’s alignment with the ideology of property-relation (for instance, to treat oneself as property) draws attention away from the political paradigm. This habituated preoccupation, an existential waste of time, renders the person blind to his own predicament. Through his subjection, he is blind to the possibility that the political economy is ultimately responsible for his libidinal economy.5 My intention is not to say that all walks of sociality are marked by types of technologies. Instead, the point is that psychic and material mediations (objects, concepts, signs that act as the medium, the transistor between persons and their desires) serve as socializing technologies—from the habituation of interpersonal relations to that of modes of self-relating and quality of thought. At the dawn of the culture industry, the consumer society was marked by the changing authorities over the domains of socializing institutions. Reducing socialization processes down to their participants and roles, we can see that the makeup of the process has been changing as the role of socializing shifted from the parental circle to the peer group and then to economy. If we consider the fact that a new generation must always be trained to valorize the act of working to get satisfaction, socialization also acts as an interpersonal technology for future-social-actor training. Dominant theories of social reproduction that have consolidated the relation between a person and the intergenerational community presume that he is born into the normalized, middle-class family—mostly for disappointingly unreflexive reasons. As a consequence, the primary site of the family experience has remained beyond the scope of political awareness—that is, subject-formation and exploitation of object-relations within this social institution are treated as apolitical. The rationale is a reproductive one: the general concept of the family, that is, the middle class, tripartite family, must endure for the

Chapter One

47

gears of reproducing individuation (alongside the capacity for production, consumption, and reproduction) to continue to spin. The early-established and later-sustained patterns of habitual reproduction of how one relates to himself, his body and mind, and the external world, make up the course of human development. The result is a singular line of alignment across which one perceives other people as authorities, whose sense of being as such resonates emotionally through the mark made on his physical and psychical body as well as his historical sense of self by his primary socializers. In the mainstream, socialization is never discussed as a technology, frankly it seems that most of the time it is not clear whether contemporary psychology can even acknowledge that socialization as the process of reproduction of culturally-patterned relations between parents and their offspring. A lot of this initial insight into the mechanics of social reproduction and its intertwining with the development of subjectivity was first explored in psychoanalytic theory. This tradition, ironically or perhaps adhering to its historical nature, bore the burden of being tasked with creating the categorical prioritization of psychic values that would promote vertical alignment, productivity, exteriorization. So, to read history into psychoanalytic insight on the subject of the structuration of human psyche through development and socialization, would mean to read the middle class family into its theory of libidinal economy. At the center of those most productively consumptive, ‘normal’ family relations, we find the father at the disciplinary head, mother at the emotional center, siblings as prototypical, secondary competitors. The nuclear family is built around a power disequilibrium which cannot be resolved. Ultimately the reasoning is once again strictly ideological; it cannot be undone, its realizing institution cannot be reformed, because it guarantees the reproduction of nec-

48

The Loot Loop

6. This mechanism of social reproduction works with and through ideology. Such recognition of the pre-formation of the subject has caused many political theorists to address young subjects in the processes of structural reproduction. Although instructive for those of us seeking to understand the conditions under which “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please,” these studies have tended to be skewed. They leave no space for the young subject as someone always grappling with the grip of totalizing socialization; nor could they conceptualize an alternative mode of socialization which does not shriek at the sight of its own doing. The work of Laing and Cooper are amongst those who viewed traditional institutions of socialization as ‘faulty’ precisely along these lines of reproducing psychic disagency. Long before that glimmer, the central idea was present with Rousseau, where in writing Emile, he laid out an alternative to traditional socialization and education that would empower instead of fragment a person’s existential prowess. Thus, the accomplishment of psychoanalytic theory, and object-relations theory more specifically, is limited to the individual ideologies of its theorists, and in its bourgeois spirit, it is disciplined away from radical conclusions by the productive ideologies of individualism and autonomy that reproduced that culture and economy.

essary character types for the perpetuation of class interests, which is intertwined with sociality by way of ideology’s link between the community and the individual through symbols and fantasy. When the prospect of reformation is demarcated as beyond the bounds of objection, the only consolation that the status quo can offer comes in the form of perpetual displacement of the power disequilibrium onto the social realms of experience beyond the threshold of the family home—some say this is how we are enabled to fall in love with a stranger, carry on the rule of law in our hearts, or even simply care to role play with others. In this way, the person on the way to being plucked by the political economy never attains critical consciousness of the biting power, because its structure is reflected by others on all walks of life, passively communicating itself as being natural, and thus an unavoidable, unobjectionable reality. The child always loses. Mainstay psychology is built on this power disequilibrium. When addressing any social problems the mainstream traces them back to early childhood or adolescent development, stemming from inadequate trans-generational communication regarding the systems of power. In other words, it is accepted that socialization is about the coming of authority for those youth who must accept to be subjugated to its reign.6 In this sense socialization (re)distributes symbolic value by ranking its participant population into manageable enclaves. Even children get to be recognized as on-theway-to-power, or older-than-before, attaining a higher class, marks, intelligence, etc. The child does not develop on his own terms (that would be impossible). Instead, children are socialized into conformity with the needs of the given historical reality. Moreover, a child’s attempts to understand and live within the world on his own terms are blocked. The society produces false consciousness out of necessity. Instrumental social ends

Chapter One

49

and assuring the conformity of the individual with his world justify the reproduction of repetition of certain intergenerational relations with the inevitable result of a psychology of structured, consolidated, and predetermined relations. The Entanglement of Subjectivity and Specie-ality Lived experiences of socialization produce the subject—the idea of the self, the "I", or how a person imagines themselves. Those experiences became proving grounds for the structutation of the psyche, and particularly one's relation to themselves. It is in this sense that lived experience is the grounds for the politically consequential potential in that person—his capacity for autonomy and agency, especially as socialization subjugates the subject to the group. After all, institutionally-consolidated psychology still generally contends that people are raised towards consciousness, conscientiousness, and unconscious reproduction of what is generally assumed as the good. By means of habituated libidinal and affective motivations, persons unconsciously and categorically distinguish between folk and family. They internalize the law of the community in the form of an unconscious directive. In this primary site of socialization, a newly arrived person is subjected to internalization of affective ties and responses, so much so that one would viscerally shriek at the mental image of breaking a valorized taboo. Every person considered a functioning member of a socio-economic cultural cell, a family, has externally-imposed psychic processes that regulate and (re) produce communicable, meaningful experience. The concepts by which one will ascertain to think his own self-awareness are tied to both the cultural character at the center of the socialization patterns as well as the

accidentally constituted subjective experience, which is also mediated by objects and constituted in relation to their affectivity. What makes this scenario especially complicated is the fact that everyone voluntarily participates. Even in the most highly esteemed ‘developed’ societies where we presume to have created a society for the socialization of self-determining individuals, the adult world consciously (self-interestedly) and unconsciously (reproductively, and more residually) engages in subversive relational reproduction. It is a generational indoctrination, which entails manipulating the formative psychic narratives of the young through the implantation or omission of certain sensitivities and defenses. This “subjectification” ties the loose ends of one’s developing emotional life by consolidating historical materiality with ideology. Ideology here means something more than post-rational politics—it connotes making up for what the social reality lacks in an effort to direct the flow of engagement between the subject and society. In the same logic, the establishment of the Ego’s mastery (we can also call this center rationality, the executive center of the brain, or some other rationalizing concept) is rationalized in terms of the social system’s need for dominance over the psychic domain.7 In this way, the filters and sensors for social affectation are programmed (a process banalized under the banner of child development), and the emotional memory, which supports the authenticity of the subject’s drive for life, is refined and developed by social experience. The society produces the necessary means by which it can reproduce itself independent of human reason or the individual’s intentions to contribute to the replenishment of the whole. Much is solidified in this process. Overriding instincts are repressed and sublimated, forms and con-

50

Chapter One

The Loot Loop

7. See Horowitz (1977), on Reich and Rank.

51

cepts are tied to experience, affects are hierarchized, values prioritized. A whole notion of valorization—the sense and quality of the psychic act of tying value to objects—begins to unfold. A good deal of valuable emotional meaning is withheld from consciousness of the subject. Made up of affective imprints of object relations established during formative moments, these fragments of subjective emotional life become the unconscious to fulfill the social goal of providing stability not only to secure the person’s perseverance to live, but also his usefulness according to the socio-economic and cultural economies. Elders, adults, and institutions are complicit in the perpetuation of this auto-social-reproduction. But, at least theoretically, hope for the individual is presumably still on the table. Self-consciousness could still become critical (revolutionary, political, or suicidal) in relation to how one relates to the world one is born into as long as the institutions of socialization do not become too industrialized. Historically it could have still been the case that somehow enough non-conceptualized, non-accounted-for meaning/value escaped being wholly captured by this process of consolidating the subject with structures; the utopian fantasy could still have been believable that enough spillover or surplus intentionality escaped to form the unanticipatable (authentic) subjectivity of a self-determining, autonomous human being—the person who could imagine his own liberation from the life of service to the commodity fetish, and offer an alternate non-repressive social order. On the microeconomic level, viewing socialization as a technology lifts the veil preventing us from placing political judgment on structured family relations. Put another way, to treat socialization as a technology would mean to read guilt as a psycho-political technology. Guilt is an interpersonally-cultivated feeling that creates an

involuntary bond to an other. And as one among a defined set of relationalities that make up the general experience of primary identification, guilt becomes a tool in the service of social regulation. Just because it is of sacred social value, it does not mean that object relations as a psycho-technology cannot be coopted, hijacked, or redeployed. In terms of the generations and reproduction of generational and social labor, guilt and interpersonal transferential affects alike become manipulatable relations—in the same sense that trauma can be such powerful, transformative experiences. In fact, there is a close relationship between the historical narrative of a culture and the trauma to which children are generationally subjected as they become members of the social organization. In this view trauma is an affective experience that becomes a manipulatable social object. In formative childhood, trauma affectively loads objects with meaning and unconscious attachment. If the trauma is repeated routinely, ritualized into the life of a social system, then it can become a means of regulation across individualities—if every boy is subjected to a personalized experience of one particular traumatic and epiphanic experience at a culturally specified time, then it can be said that that milieu of boys comes to share a generational character trait. That trait becomes a backdoor into exploiting the raw value-producing power in individual persons with the result of complicating the person’s relations to desire, secession, life and death. Trauma can be genealogized as a psycho-technique of social reproduction and socialization, even though paradoxically the process of identifying the traumatic (that is, the stunning for the sake of cooptation) is subjective. But, if trauma, as a pschodynamic developmental experience, boils down to being a direct experience of the real—in the least bit about the unsublimat-

52

Chapter One

The Loot Loop

53

ed—then, for any generation typically destined for social reproduction, this type of institutionalized, regulative trauma frames the standards of the socially-reproductive self-consciousness. In this sense, trauma, given the socio-historical conditions, acts as a force of qualitative psycho-social transformation. My objection is that the qualitative standard is socially and unconsciously reproduced. In the contemporary consumer society, young people who are subjected to consumer socialization are stuck in a loop of relating to themselves in terms of maintaining their own experience of lack. Otherwise the consumer society would not survive the pressure built up by the perpetual disappointment that people would come to realize that time and again they are being sold secondary fulfillment with the promise of fulfilling the primary lack instantiated by the initial phantasmagoria of the affective.8 Instead of social therapy, consumer capitalism ‘thingifies’ relations to trauma-like affects that predate one’s becoming self-aware. Consumer socialization then creates bonded relations by controlling the development of subjectivity—by guiding the development of a person’s social performativity, how that person views himself and performs himself in the world.9 It seems important to note that it is usually at this juncture that normative and critical thought differentiates itself. For example, the institutionalized psychoanalytic theory would put this matter in a different way; it would say that socialization is a process of the external redirection of narcissistic emotionality. The difference is that in the minute expression of their theory, no longer even claiming to the ideal task of assisting persons in their journey towards their rightful claim to self-consciousness and autonomy, socially cultivated narcissism is naturalized, thus naturalizing the generationally replayed politics of incorporation. If the society is presumed to be the de facto system

54

The Loot Loop

8. Gardner’s (2013) App Generation, Boyd’s (2014) It’s Complicated, as well as Boelstroff’’s (2010) Coming of Age in Second Life all dance around these themes, but in the end minimize the role of digital consumer technology in shaping the everyday lives of adolescents, because they lack political lenses akin to the ones I presented in the first part of this chapter. 9. Freud (1966) and Lacan (1954) posited primary identification as the constitutive, subjective process that underpinned the development of the child’’s own agency. The concept captures the subjective experience of a child recognizing and internalizing the power of his parental unit. Lacan (1954) argues that the unconscious is explicitly structured through the experience of language (37-38). This is related to the question of ideology. Under certain approaches to subjectivity, identifying as a subject is to access the self through language, which of necessity happens within the ideology of a dominant power structure. For example, in critical theory, Horkheimer (1972) held the position that class-consciousness was both constrained by the prevailing ideological conditions and of necessity would create its own ideology as its means of political articulation.

of organization, then socialization is bound to be rationalized as a creation and solidification of (inter-)dependence on the social-external in an effort to organize the persona and social character of an individual. Socialization secures the long-term productivity and service of the person towards the effort of social reproduction. And, if it were not a process that guaranteed the perpetuation of a society, socialization would be more readily critiqued for being an institutionalized instance of the establishment of compulsory and repetitive projection, identification, and objectification; it would be seen as a process of structured stimulation through everyday habituation, which would not necessarily raise concerns if it were not for the fact that the activity laid beyond the bound of self-awareness. The Real and the Imagined, the Ideal and the Fantasized In the stable, ideological, hallucinatory past of the social regime, all the holes tend to be plugged as there cannot be any vestige for sewing the seeds of political resistance in the development of a person’s sense of self. After all, what makes a neurotic a neurotic is his subjective experience, his fixation on the fact that his sociality delineates from the norms. Typical of the consumer society’s appropriation of the aspiration for subjectivity in a young person, institutionalized social reproduction leaves no openings that might lead youth towards genuine political development—not some imitation-driven reproduction of political performances, but of an ongoing self-reflexivity towards defining the order of one’s internal objects. Without a way to consciously participate in the daily running of his own libidinal economy, the individual remains a manipulated subject of the social system. This fact portends the possibility of a new education. Marcuse succinctly captures that sentiment:

Chapter One

55

the distinction between rational and irrational authority, between repression and surplus-repression, can be made and verified by the individuals themselves. That they cannot make this distinction now does not mean that they cannot learn to make it once they are given the opportunity to do so.10 The inevitable effect of the social-psychological alienation, which the child socialized by consumer society through televisual mediation experiences, is an unanticipated possibility towards this sort of a new education. Over the course of the last two decades social science has grappled with understanding the many symptoms of this historical process of alienation. As alienation, the commodification is a distancing from the social indoctrination processes, and becomes the grounds of the primary ethics in the constitution of the liberation to come—even though it is born in a moment of secondary, that is superfluous repression. Socialization frames and structures initial self-conception and points to the experiences of disjunction which allow the young person to develop ideas outside of social mandate. Early on through moments of observing parental slips, misprojections, and self-contradiction, the child realizes that his parents are not solely the authorities over complete truth. More than merely withholding insight into the workings of the world, the parents (as the progenitors of the internalized ideals) are thus exposed as unreliable carriers of critical information about the reality. As the child develops his sensitivity to the parental psychic messages, he continues to be further alienated, and the psychic development of his own self-awareness and his own subjectivity take on unexpected terms. In a primary political sense, this is a therapeutic alienation through which self-consciousness develops out of vestiges of imitation and identification with authority. Conversely, this also means that

56

The Loot Loop

10. Marcuse, (1972), p. 232.

11. We should note the appearance of a key political principle in this particular context. What happens to the flows of psychic surplus embody the founding possibility of liberation. Under the reign of normative socialization, according to law and culture, the flows crystallize in terms of the child-subject’s self-consciousness.

identification and internalization of authority become psycho-social technologies to recapture the misfiring affectation initially framed by primary socialization. 11 The value of critical youth studies lies in the possibility of youth’s claims to critical political consciousness against a mindless system attuned to treating the human as an object. The problem is that young subjectivity is most often presumed to be a static, predetermined experience of development. From various archaeologies, we know that the reification of youth occurred under the consolidation of bureaucratic management with economic interests—a trajectory established from corrective clinical motivations such as understanding various pathologies, which are approached ‘realistically,’ that is, ‘scientifically’ and not historically. The developmental framework has come to own the language around health and well-being: normative development schema always-already dictate the best (that is, the ‘only’) outcome: normative adulthood (in historically-contingent world capitalism). When well-being is categorically rationalized according to a sense of development, it is limited in its scope, because it operates within the parameters that establish youth as a transitory subject position on the way to maturity of an adult human being, whose subject-position is functionally defined as an ability to meet the minimum standards of capitalist-oriented productivity. The presumption of banality with regards to all that is normalized under socialization covers up the fact that with every newborn, the gears of the economy of social reproduction turn. In fact there is a timeless truth about the trans-generationality of a given political economy: youth, the newly arrived weaklings, are the sacrificed— they are the means to replenish the existing social order by providing a fresh source of raw materials to valorize the commodified world anew. After all, it is in youth that in consumer society the idiosyncrasies of object-re-

Chapter One

57

lationally-cultivated narcissisms align with the political economic interests as concrete linkages between desires and objects in the real. The political economic role of youth rests on how they are subjected to authority and mediation for self-conception. In this way the terms of power relations in socialization come to mirror the patterns of relations of a given political economy. Towards the Role of Gaming in the Consumer Libidinal Economy The psycho-social structures that govern everyday life in the consumer society currently are the culmination of an unprecedented level of commercially-geared manipulation of the psycho-social circumstances of the young over multiple generations across the 20th century. We know its processes by names all too well. They displace the solution to the pervading social and economic problems. By marketing handed-down military technology as a panacea for the alienation caused by commodification consumer society effectively impedes dialectical aesthetic and social development. In societies conditioned to regularly undergo the process, the cyclical nature of finance capital’s extraction of value from the rest of the political economy necessitates the perpetual necessity of prolonging consumption or finding ways of extending the life of the desire motivating it. So, it should not be hard to imagine that the cycles of transformation as the consequence of commodification spill over into the familial sphere, causing the mutation of relations in the formative scenes. A child’s sense of self develops in relation to his parents as he comes to conceive of the world not through a gradated, partial exposure to the world of their genealogical predecessors, but on their own, in the comfort of commodities deemed appropriate emotional objects from up high. For the political reading of psychical violence of commodification and its transformation of cultural,

and especially familial relations, self-consciousness takes on a particularly sharp political valiance in this context: in the very event when the child is alienated from his parents, who were initially the direct suppliers of symbolization towards self-consciousness, which might happen at any one of the institutionally schedule occasions that lead to the child’s separate and singular sense of his own experience. Here he begins to not only observe and formulate concepts in a vacuum of parental authority, but he also adopts the mediating consumer object and its socially and economicallyprefigured relationality into his own trajectory towards a self-consciousness. In other words, for the children of consumer society, their parents supply the ideological concepts to develop their own internal object relations and emotional languages. But, since the responsibility for the definition can only be with the child and not with the parental agents, the political problem of regulated self-consciousness becomes apparent in the lack of agency of the child to protect or guide the formation of his object-relational flows away from predetermining commodification. The exploitative value of a habit of interacting with the world through consumer technologies registers through processes that organize the nature of self-awareness of inner life. Post-industrial consumer-orientation of capitalist surplus-extraction forestalls the individual’s ability to cope with the new terms of existence and preservation, and consequently cannot provide socially sustainable outlets for individual frustration. As the proverbial map always already precludes the terrain, the consumer economy drives the pressure for limit-expansion of self-consciousness to the point where one is always already situated in a world of predetermined desires and their satisfaction, where the flexibility of inner object relations is so plastic that it can be molded to provide itself with satisfaction from any num-

58

Chapter One

The Loot Loop

59

ber of objects, inadvertently causing the complete depoliticization of the subject’s private conceptions. This I call the privatization of psycho-social relations. Through economized mediation standardized by the televisual consumer culture, the process plays a key role in the gadgetization-driven consumerism of today. Historically the advent has been associated with the reification of the middle class nuclear family, but it will be more useful to think of it as alienation of that which was culturally patterned to occur at certain periods in the young child’s life, which, now re-territorialized by means of technological mediation and commodification, occur at an industrially chosen interval to produce the most economically respondent subjectivities and libidinal economies. To treat gaming in terms of how it is tied to consumer economy as a concrete agreement among the dominant industrial interests of the consumer society exposes social stability as closely tied to circulation of valorization and disinvestment. Thus profitability, which keeps the current global system running, comes to depend on psychic mediation, and the extraction of that potential into economic streams (this I will refer to as surplus extraction). For the consumer subjects, this profit extraction can be observed to be fixated on the consumers’ work to reproduce themselves as consumer subjects. In gaming, it involves the use of mediative technology to take control over the maintenance of particular object-relational formations, and thus control the formation of particular moments of subjecthood. In other words, profit extraction in the specific case of the metropolitan consumers depends in part on the recirculation of psycho-social and cultural residues (those particular regimes of object-relations, structural identities, and interpellations) into techniques that perpetuate its linkage between subjects and objects—not unlike the family institutions and its mechanical reliance

on love, hate, and guilt. The fact of the matter is that the political consequence of such re-institutionalization remain only vaguely ascertained, while it is true that the intensification of commodity production, that inescapable reality of modern capitalism, creates an increasingly antisocial, and repressive political economy. Gaming appears benign as long as the psychological relations tying persons to their imaginaries via consoles remains mystified. The avatar and its limited in-game agency can parade as harbingers of digitally-sponsored liberation as long as we are not reminded that real people (with real political economic and cultural structural positionalities) elect to occupy those subject-positions in the course of their everyday habitual lives. As soon as we localize the gamer subject as a young person in the process of coping with and addicting to the world, games can be seen as taking part in formative socialization, that is, subject-formation. For a considerable portion of consumer-society youth (whom I will refer to as the metropolitan youth), computer games are not only sites of digital mediation. They have become a means of socialization and part of their everyday relating to their own selves. As an example, I will be offering the World of Warcraft (WoW), which is still one of the most popular MMOs in the world, but whose importance in the overall picture of the gaming-libidinal economy has changed dramatically since the conception of this book. Beyond WoW and role-playing games alike, modern gaming deploys onscreen identification as a kind of avatar-gamer relational container, which we will scrutinize. I intend to focus on the adolescent subject on the imperial home front, because it strikes me that adolescence as a subject position is especially reified for the purpose of legitimizing particular social relations between the person and the society, and thus would offer some much needed clarity on the matter of psycho-politics. After all, in its interactivity, the technique of gaming

60

Chapter One

The Loot Loop

61

taps into repetition and habituation—two concepts that become central to the technique of gadget-mediated self-relation. Even as a mere amalgamation of psychological techniques, gaming becomes the means of particular social reproduction, one which also guarantees that the commodification will continue by replenishment from within. And, there are unforeseeable consequences to the commodification and alienation, a newer consciousness, a newer politics. Gaming is a capitalist enterprise, and the uncritically accepted fact is that this process of subject-avatar relation is shaped by ideologues who have consolidated their social responsibility with their chosen task of chasing profitability. Researchers have only alluded to the implications of gaming impinging upon youth development. An adolescent might adopt an avatar for his own subjective purposes, but this activity takes place within a venture that generates profits, and arguably reflects the tendency of advanced capitalism to extend itself into new domains of human life. In this case, it extends to searching for the exploitable relationality in the gamer’s psyche. Because it is increasingly likely that activities of self- and social-development take place in this virtual world, it is also likely that gaming plays a decisive role in subject-formation and socialization. Thus, gaming becomes an ideological, politicaleconomic, and subject-formative institution for youth, especially for those carriers of the dominant social hierarchy, the patriarchal male youth.

62

The Loot Loop

Chapter One

63

Chapter Two Ideology as technology in political economy

1. If you are interested in sampling this literature, see Schmidt and Cohen (2013), and Castranova (2007).

In the daily operations of the inner sanctums of the consumer society, technology functions within the ideological confines of productivity, efficiency, and enhancement—it kills boredom, makes us more productive, keeps us regulated…it makes things better! On the surface, it is presumed pure as the guarantor of increasing efficiency and productivity; its value depends only on how and by whom it is used. A circling discussion on the distinction between a pure utility and historical instantiation draws attention away from condensing around clear articulations about just what is going on. However, beyond the comforting vestiges of ideology, as operative within the consumer political economy, technology shapes how society qualifies and secures its own perpetuation. It opens economic access to otherwise uncontrollable realms of subjective experience that can be utilized anew to harvest more intense involvement in social, historical undertakings. Consumer technology tends to be celebrated as the harbinger of a “new digital age,” promising a new historical era of efficiency of information collection and dissemination, democratic participation and accountability, and overall society-wide productivity.1 But, the apparatus does not simply resolve retrospectively identified historical shortcomings. Contrary to the popu-

lar assumptions, this technology is not a mediator of already existing needs, because it functions as an apparatus of mediation and identification—it imposes its own standards to be reproduced. The process is not a transhistorical given when it comes to social reproduction, but a specific form of subject production in an instance of the historical political economy. First there was television. When the consumer society first became the dominant organizing structure, taking full advantage of the inevitable bouts of alienation in the postwar years, television was midwife to the culture industry in producing the initial model for the consumer subject, his familial triangulation, his larger narrative loops, and all the economies that might intersect with his life. In turn the industry operationalized television as a technology of mediation tasked with dissemination of ideas and expectations about the reigning political economy. The fact that a person must direct his gaze and attention to the television has given the gadget enormous consequential power. By acting as the mediator, the television would essentially regulate the phenomenological experience necessary for the unfolding political economy, because its televisual mediation psychologically and ideologically supports the economically necessary alteration of the collective quality of subjectivity. Put in other words, the television would reduce the imagined quality of desired experience to that of the commodity both through its own technical limitations and its producers’ overt and unconscious planning. The consumer object would come to regulate the relational experience meted out, and the producers, as agents of ideological reproduction, regulate the expression of the instinctual within the bounds of the semiotic given. In the background of digital technology and contemporary ludocapitalism, there is the pretext of televisual mediation, which marks an important assumption

in drawing a line between pleasure and semiotics: deriving pleasure (or another kind of affect) from an event (or an object) no longer needs to have a concrete stimulant. Two psycho-social concepts capture the psychological realm over which commodification of interiority takes place—socialization and habituation. Under the banner of socialization, a person develops emotional relations with internalized representations of real objects, things as well as persons. A person constructs a sense of being in the world through the ways in which he comes to relate to those internalized objects, which go through their own transmutation in the process of internalization where they are reified in certain idealized essences. Habituation, on the other hand, signals to a more basic, psychological process. It is perhaps the oldest psycho-technology, because it rests on repetition and the gravity (desire/affect intensity) it creates in the libidinal economy. Over time, routines become internalized as habits, and as habits, this activity comes to represent the material parallel of the libidinal economy structured under socialization. Considered together, socialization and habituation denote the psychic territory of commodification. The picture gets clearer already, because commodification then is not solely of the finite universe of the real, but manifests also as the commodification of social relations for its technical capture of reproduction, which capital uses to secure future (habitual) consumption-orientation. It does so at the point of contact between the way in which the makers decide to prolong the players’ immersion in the game, and how the resulting structures affect the already existing psycho-social structures of subjectivity they mobilize for their economic cause. In the very methods of social reproduction, particularly those identifiable social-relational or psycho-structural processes (e.g. identification, repression, and sublimation), we can find spaces to observe the double

66

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

67

bind encrusting the subject——socialization and economy. This whole complex circles the fate of the subject perpetually being (re)formed. As things stand at the present the ongoing commodification takes away even more from the vestiges of self-determination that could have been realized under the pre-digital historical sociality. The new regime of consumer mediation competes with the historically existing (residual) social reproductive institutions. Even though mechanisms of social reproduction have no conscious qualitative preference, since they are not living things but structures, concretizations by way of transgenerational transmission of repetition and object-relation, that is, natality, coalesce around the idea of sociality, intersubjectivity, and interdependent self-conception.2 Consumer capitalism as we have come to know it liberates affect from various historical carrier-objects, meaning that the function of object-relations as cultivated in the middle class family are lifted from the original context and transposed into the dominion of capital. Take Pavlov's classical conditioning as a technological discovery: pleasure can come from a tailored repetition, that is, a mere satisfactory illusion of attainment. It can be simulated, which means that the subjective reproduction of libidinal attachments to symbols and images, those societally arranged concepts of meaning, still take place. People are placated to the terms of the political economic ‘game’ through a process, in which they involve themselves with simulations of historically established ways of desiring and satisfaction—ways of psycho-social valuation that fit familiar formulas of correspondence between the intensity of work and the pleasure of attainment. Consumer technology is a technique of mediation, and it enables the manipulation of historically inaccessible psychological and social processes. Unlike mediation by the human body, that is, the fact that the body

68

The Loot Loop

2. Arendt (1958). Arendt’s distinction between labor and activity in the initial chapters of the Human Condition presents the effect of such generalization. It has the effect of naturalizing otherwise social and political relations between individuals, particularly through the way the question of industrial technology is treated in the molding of productive social relations. That being said, Arendt also represents a popular conception of history marked by a certain scientific-effacing of historically political residual affect.

3. What is popularly known as ludocapitalism is a mechanism that conceptualizes the existence of massively popular digital gaming industry within contemporary global capitalism and its relation to modern modes of labor and value. Ludocapitalism is the term used by contemporary thinkers in the field observing video gaming as a social and motherly phenomena to signify the kind of capitalist social relations in which one plays a game for work.

is also a mediator between the person as self-constituted and the world, gadgetized mediation occurs between the person and the structures of the political economy. More specifically, mediative technology enables economic redirection of ideological processes—the historical and person-specific matrix of psycho-social processes of internalized and habituated relations to objects and symbols. There is a political ramification to the fact that consumer capitalism utilizes technology to befriend psycho-social processes meant for social-reproduction towards furthering its need for deepening and perpetuating consumption. Technology serves the consumer capitalist political economy by manipulating already-existing historical processes toward extraction of value-creative substance from individual consumers. How this psychology of ideology is framed has deeply political consequences—the extent of the “engineering of consent,” the possibility of the technological co-optation of socialization, or the mere prospect of individual autonomy. Ideology, conceived as a mitigating apparatus procuring continual (re)production of subject-position opens up to a notion of the political in the psychosocial and psychologically-constitutive dimension beyond the limits of the theoretical insight supplied by isolated discourses on the fate of the subject. This notion of the political is necessary to distinguish between socialization and commodification within the reign of a capitalist political economy—a point that clarifies the stakes in social scientific research on ludocapitalism. 3 Consumers adopt everyday relations with consumer gadgets that mediate their routine orientations towards their important psychic objects like social status, sense of the hierarchy, foresight and capacity to recall important information. They habitually rely on popular technology for social and economic activity. Since the technology affects the attention processes of the psyche, how would we explain the qualitative impact of be-

Chapter Two

69

ing ‘plugged-in’? The commodification of psycho-social processes belonging to socialization and ideology has turned them into psycho-technologies, techniques that regulate the qualitative experience of mediation.4 In other words, psycho-technology affirms the conceptual value in our effort to consider how mediative consumer technology incorporates the psycho-social realm of experience—the grounds of socialization and social-reproductive processes, which have traditionally been outside the theoretical scope of capitalist extraction. Considering the psychological situation of the consumer self-other relations as a psycho-technology enables us to dig below the conceptual isolation of the social, the economic, and the psychological—beyond separation of the libidinal and the symbolic—into the fuzzy terrain of the psycho-social where the concreteness of the material world meets the idealized internal universe. The political-economic incorporation of the subject requires that the ways that person signifies his psychic economy, the way that he has come to habitually reproduce his identificatory regimes, become subject to standardization. The economy of consumption secures re-circulation by deploying object relations built on misrecognition. Misrecognition, as the loaded act underwriting ideology, marks the distance between representations and their consummating intent. In this sense, misrecognition is necessary for the circulation of commodification of the psychological (or the imaginary). In the case of video games and social media, the implication is that the emotional anticipation of new audiovisual stimuli tunes the psychic to expecting the formatted images from those sites of production.5 To offer a contemporary example, we can take up the scenario of an adolescent person’s anticipation of what is new on the frontage of Facebook as an affectively-substantive experience, a hallucination of an expected

70

The Loot Loop

4. The concept of psycho-technology is credited Stiegler (2010). He uses the term to represent micro-regulation of attention, which he observes in the consumerization of intergenerational habitus and the substitution of intergenerational relations in instances such as imitation, facilitation of sublimation, and anxiety-tolerance by televisual guidance.

5. There are signs in contemporary research, at least on the side of consumer research, that this idea has already been commercial deployed: for example, Cottrell and Rajecki (1974), in “the energizing effects of post-decision dissonance upon performance of an irrelevant task,” offer a theory of the profit-potential in users’ emotional investment in performance of repetitive, “irrelevant” tasks; Zwick (2006), in “the epistemic consumption object and post social consumption: expanding consumer-object theory in consumer research,” on the other hand, directly theorizes the commercial application of Bionian object-relations theory in his conception of post-consumption object relations.

experience. This hallucination as a mental image is a mimetic object, which is summoned by a consumer-technological object in the external world. As socially-constructed mimesis, theory would suggest that it is repressive in character, because representation is not only bound to the activity of the imaginary, but also to the selective-operationalization on the part of the apparatus. The crucial pivot lies in the fact that the socialized imaginary is the psychical agent of incorporation that serves economizing and ideological functions. In other words, instead of accepting the assumption of desire being an ‘orienting-lack,’ human desire is the tantamount source of production in an economy in which the psycho-social becomes employed towards extraction prior to finding its way into material representations. And for a specific class in the contemporary global capitalist structure, the digital medium leads to the mimetic re-coding and transplantation of consciousness and efficient censure of social knowledge. Televisual mediative technology enables industry to appropriate processes of incorporation and standardization that would otherwise have fallen under the banner of socialization. For instance, identification as a vehicle for guided-identification has long served as the bedrock of commodification. Take for example the role of commercial music in consumer spaces. A tune from a pop song bypasses the consciousness of window-shoppers and interacts with the listener’s affective situation. Identification with the lyrics, the “I” or “we” or “you,” happens in hearing an uttering of a familiar emotional statement. Geared for identification, commercial music prepares the person for the smuggling of commodification that is to come—it is a purposeful symbiosis of commercialized affect, which says, now that you identify, you realize that you are safe in the company of familiar objects, therefore draw down your defenses

Chapter Two

71

and buy that something that speaks to your self-worth. The capacity to manipulate the psycho-social ties, like the ever-present “I”-identification in commercial media, is already a form of psycho-technology. Psychological Function of Ideology In the previous chapter we talked about the basic psycho-social processes that constitute the bedrock of a person’s subjectivity—ways of loving and hating, one’s own sense of his desires, self-awareness, fantasies and ideals. In this chapter the idea is to extend this understanding into the realm of impersonal sociality, which lies outside of the familial circle, and is in many regards hard to distinguish from historical economy enveloping it. Whereas the first order of psycho-technologies of socialization deals with the primary experience of sociality and broad ideological indoctrination in the familial context, the discussion will be about a second order of psycho-technologies of socialization. These ideas are usually overlooked when they are called national or peer culture, religion, or simply dismissed as the social irrational—ideology. In lieu of the libidinal economy, fantasies and ideals appear beyond the veil of historical representation as images, iconographies, etc. In other words, the realm of psychological relations within the cultural semiotics depends on the extension of processes already established in the formative familial scene. Thus ideology extends from institutionalized psychology. These primary psychological processes situate the individual’s life-activity within the conceptual and qualitative limits of the historical political economy— this has always been deemed as a necessary consolidation that has a structural function in the historical and existential reality of being a person in a society. In this sense, ideology is reproduced actively and compulsively by the subjects as well as the state apparatuses (the functionary structures of social institu-

tions). But, the important pivot point should not be lost. There is a historical particularity to this view of ideology which hinges on unconscious processes: from the perspective of the person who uses the symbols and relationalities available to him to construct a sense of himself as an agent, an ideology is a static term for the process of coping with the historical situation of subjection and domination. A person assumes himself as a particular subject in an effort to live within the semiotics and materiality of the historical social reality which he cannot directly, consciously object. In fact, he is not even allowed access to his latent desire to escape. Instead, this reactionary desire accumulating from experiences of repression is sublimated and reanimated only through controlled, normalized pathways. There is no reality principle in the real society; instead, there are ideological rationales surrounding the performance required from social agents. When we recognize that the reality principle is a cover term for the political-economically rationalized performance principle, the psychological-ideological work undertaken by the subject is exposed for being an effort undertaken by the person to live in the world he has no chance to object. More specifically, the key mediating process in the sustainment of political economic stability seems to be the psychological process of identifying with the idealized authority in order to value oneself. Through the presumed relation between the idealized and the desire it represents, the identification imbeds the ideology of social productivity within the very process of reading oneself as an individual subject. In this way two stabilizing goals are achieved. The internalized subject is in sync with the dominant subject model. And, the person is conformed with the existing social processes. Because the secret is hidden in the very ideas and objects mediating his relation to himself, he cannot be expected to be able to know that the truth of his subjection

72

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

73

lies beyond the horizon of his self-consciousness as long as it is constituted through an amalgamated, economically-accounted ideological subjectivity. Ideology becomes a means of telling oneself a story which rationalizes the life one has to lead by allowing him to read and experience himself as a subject with power to valorize ad perpetuum and posit meaning into the world. A person identifies himself as a particular subject. After he is initially primed to do so during the formative years of his early childhood socialization, he himself must assume the role of being the immanent motivator to subconsciously identify, and (re)construct ideological subjects in his mind. The person interacts with and relates to his body and self through being a subject. That subject is a construction, and it does not equal to the person. In the life of a person who must work in the upkeep of the consumer society, one habitually occupies a number of subject-positions over the course of an average day. Some of these positions have explicit subjectivities—the embodied awareness of being a subject according to a specific context, and others that are more affective, fleeting, and unconsciously registered. Whenever the person taps into a subject position, he is jolted into intentionality to account for the state of his libidinal economy. The whole amalgam serves the person as a way to cope with the inescapability of mediation, especially in light of the fact that some of the dominant economies provide their own subjectivities. This is another way of saying that the way through which the subject is built determines the way that the subject is to be replenished. Concretely, subjectivization is like the process of adopting a stable referent as an “I,” a fitting conception of self, always already grounded in a version of the reigning power and authority. Just the fact that there is a common tongue heard in the voice of self-reflection attests to this much.

In terms of the libidinal economy, ideological identification works because it satisfies: identifying oneself in relation to an idealized authority that orders one’s sense of reality acts as pacification of the existential, divergent potential in the person; it also doubles as a guarantee for the person’s extension of life beyond their sense of self. The point after all is to self-soothe by going through the appropriate motions to feel valuable, to feel better. The in-psyche experience of the reconstruction of the “I,” has the feel of an image in your mind just like a memory of a near-death experience or that of a film recently seen. This internalized emotional-visual image of “I” is the predecessor to the role the avatar (now in a game) plays for the person—only now it is no longer a private, existential affair. The avatar is on-screen, and the process is no longer local to being within a person’s psychology. It will be clearer through an example from common consumer experience—the ubiquitous relating to and through consumer entertainment, our lives with movies, TV shows, actors, narratives, and so on. The way in which people identify with onscreen characters (as people and ideas collectively valued) during their experience of being audiences: this is a form of consumer-socialization by identification. In the experience of watching a film, the audience enjoys as long as the film can capture a proximal signal to culturally attuned processes of identification. Here the example is a reality-television, cookingcompetition show called Top Chef, because it offers us a snapshot of the kind of social relationalities and dimensionalities normalized under the banner of everyday audience-actor-producer triangulations. Top Chef serves ‘pleasurable’ identification, which is nurtured by all the parties involved in its production. Hailing itself as reality-based, a silent presumption is nurtured by all parties involved that a social event is being documented with only the slightest editing necessary for

74

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

75

narrativizing. Of course, in reality the gaze of the viewer is fixed. The competition is work not only for the producers and the actors, but also for the audiences. The audience, the participants, and the production team work in their respective class-befitting false-consciousness to reproduce the link between the reigning ideology of competition and that of personal, embodied habits of identification and object-relation. In the show, the participants are self-selected as competitors as each one of them desires to be the winner. The contestants perform themselves knowing that their chances of winning not only lie in their trade skills, but also in their identificatory value as identificatory-containers for the audience. The audience, on the other hand, misidentifies this projective identification as having libidinal value, which they register as entertainment. In consumer society the televisual dampens the violence of exploitation by reproducing the paradigm of domination in ideology. In the way that the audience identifies with the competitors in a show, the formation of the subject away from consciousness-encouraging positionality is promoted towards stimulating-but-deterritorialized cross-identification. As such the stimulation that the technology provides anesthetizes persons according to the political economic (and psycho-social) positioning of their given subjecthood. But, the question remains as to the relation becoming a regular substitute for non-commodified affect. Now we have video games that allow role-playing in scenarios from those relations with onscreen characters. In first-person shooter games following the formula of franchises such as Call of Duty and Battlefield, players re-enact the most cathartic scenes of Hollywood war cinema (namely Saving Private Ryan and the Band of Brothers) by having their view, range of motion, and capacity for self-help directed while still preserving the semblance of agency captured by having controls and

Reconsidering the Demands of Being a Consumer Subject How a person thinks of himself, and how in his reflections he locates himself emotionally in relation to the

76

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

being the player. And so the experience of being a film audience is bridged to that of being a gamer. A way into the psycho-social construction of audience and gadgetized mediations can be uncovered in any instance where we can observe the identification that an audience must undertake in reproducing itself as an audience. In the everyday psycho-social (libidinal-) economy of the global capital metropoles, consumer media serves the function of deploying basic identification with social relational familiarity in the name of entertainment (that is, satisfaction). The guided relationality keeps audiences away from questioning the formulaic repetition situated at the center of their entire social system within which they must learn to live. The fact that the televised world cannot fall apart, the familiar celebrity faces always return even after actors themselves have long expired, and every challenge is resolved within the allocated time frame, all silently confirm the value of the televisually simulated reality principle—commodity is supreme, because repeatable and amnesiac enjoyment is the best. In the remainder of this chapter, I hope to elaborate on this emerging relationship through a discussion on the development of increasingly interactive televisual media, and how they mobilize the process of ideological identification. In order to do so, we need to turn to the terms usually deployed to make sense of how persons become entangled in the formation and sustainment of each others' lives. The so-called psycho-social object relations have an explicit function in operationalizing a given ideology as conditioning the inner life of a person to suit the political economy.

77

outside world, make up a certain ideological consciousness for that person as a subject. Generally speaking, the various social and political economies use ideological consciousness to guarantee that the person living in the society relates to his life in a way that always reconfirms the foundational ideas of the social organization. In the consumer society, capitalism serves this function by keeping a person’s idealized sense of themselves with a reference in the world of commodities. In this way, the political economy guarantees that the person living within the walls of the home fortress of global capital identifies himself as a consumer subject every time he thinks of himself, or reflects on his motivating fantasies and desires. The challenge for consumer techno-capitalism is the exploitation of the process of desiring, which I have talked about in terms of person-object relations or relationalities. Baudrillard put it in a fitting way: It is necessary to overcome the ideological understanding of consumption as a process of craving and pleasure, as an extended metaphor on the digestive functions——where the whole issue is naturalized according to the primary scheme of the oral drive. It is necessary to surpass this powerful imaginary preconception in order to define consumption not only structurally as a system of exchange and of signs, but strategically as a mechanism of power. Now, the question of consumption is not clarified by the concept of needs, nor by theories of their qualitative transformation, or their massive extension: these phenomena are no more than the characteristic effect, at the individual level, of a certain monopolistic productivity, of a totalitarian economy (capitalist or socialist) driven to conjuring up leisure, comfort, luxury, etc.; briefly, they are the ultimate realization of the private individual as a productive force.6

78

The Loot Loop

6. Baudrillard (1985), p. 85 (own emphasis).

7. Baudrillard (1998),p. 85.

A matter of the necessity to condition the subjective, a person must be culturally motivated to habituate a routine of reproducing psychic investment in the composite image of the most dominantly celebrated—that is, a middle-class-aspiring materialist, who wants nothing more than to plan his loops of stimulations over the span of his life—to raise a family, have a career, and enjoy a drip of foretold and recycled satisfaction. In Baudrillard’s words, the system of needs…gives rise to these private functions according to the same principle of abstraction and radical “alienation” that was formerly (and still today) the case for his labor power. In this system, the “liberation” of needs, of consumers, of women, of the young, the body, etc., is always really the mobilization of needs, consumers, the body... it is never an explosive liberation, but a controlled emancipation, a mobilization whose end is competitive exploitation. 7 Under the terms of “digitized” capitalism, psychological agency has already become a commodity through its power to mobilize a person to emotionally color his experiences. In ludocapitalism, commodification hides within the relation between the ideological subject and the in-game avatar, where the psycho-social processes from the prior forms of socialization are appropriated for newer forms of secondary socialization, that is, as processes in the ideological economy, a stir of signs and fragments, that could be tapped into to invent new motivations that perpetuate consumption. In other words, ideology becomes a technological platform. There is a distinction being made here between the general conception of the psyche, the libidinal economy and the psycho-social economy, and the

Chapter Two

79

specific instance of the psychical lived in the context of the consumer society. The distinction parallels the one made by Marcuse in his historicizing of Freud’s reality principle to create the ground of immanent critique of the reigning society. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse first suggests that we need to see the distance between the general concept of reality, and the sense of reality that operates in any given moment in the minds of the living.8 The real, lived experience Marcuse distinguishes as the “performance” principle. In this sense, there is an acknowledgment that what is real for the person has already been consolidated to what he must assume to be the limits of his performativity in a given historical moment. In the same sense, there is a distance between the general concept of psychology, and the forms that psychology adopts in any given historical moment. To mark the distinction, the historical lived experience of the psychological processes, we will call ideological, instead of psychological. Just by making the person feel good about engaging with his world of psychic objects through an imprinting and looping gadget, consumer technology has already marked the ideology-production mechanism hiding within the vestiges of the libidinal economy for exploitation. The problem is not that somehow the quality of the simulation and stimulation provided by the gadget is not up to par. My main contention with the developing trend is in the way that the consumer economy incorporates aspects of the everyday functioning of what it means to be a productive member of society. The satisfaction afforded by consumer technology comes at the price of unanticipatable, divergent subjectification that could have had a considerably different impact on the life of that person—more on this much later. Video game consoles are an example of the gadgetization of psycho-technology. Games allow the person to assume the mentality of a consumer subject in a

80

The Loot Loop

8. See Marcuse (1964). In the second chapter of the book, Marcuse distinguishes the reign of the historical society over the psyche of its inhabitants from the theoretically universal society in Freud. In doing so, Marcuse uncovers the fact that when considered in specific contexts, theories of necessary repression come under new scrutiny as the technological know-how and the abundance of a historical society can easily contradict the terms of repression it imposes on its people. This Marcuse calls “performance principle” to underscore the difference from the ideal category from which it originated.

pleasurable manner—that is, outside of the real, brutal capitalist political economy. In other words, games allow people to reclaim agency as enjoyment by inverting the imposed libidinal limit of subjectivity on them, and reinscribing it as a chosen identificatory, libidinal relation. The gamer essentially habituates a ritual through which he tricks himself into equating the simulation with reality, and prolonging his systemic toleration of an alienated life increasingly lived through and for commodities. In this way the processes of subjectivity come to be weaponized for exploitation by offering up an avatar for casual, private, pseudo-therapeutic identification—as a simulation of an empowered subjectivity. While earlier generations who lived within a more materially-oppressive system of reproduction and exploitation could be counted on to put together various narratives of agency from familial to religious ideologies, the consumer subject is cultivated in and sustained by a complex of prosthetic integration of individual people’s libidinal economies. To come back to himself, to think of himself and what his needs and desires might be, the person learns to return to the gadgets that will mediate his experience habitually. To the consumer subject, real life disappoints essentially, in the least bit because its quality is hard to anticipate or reproduce, and it quickly perishes. Games come to be a staple amongst a small set of mediated consumer relations. Those relations make up a loop in the eternal and total governance of the subject, in the name of the way that things have come to be. The total governance as such is like a ball of rubber bands, loops of libidinal compulsion tied into ever-so-interrelated chains of effort at representation, communication, symbolization, and other sorts of pleasurable meaning-making. The habitual everyday relation consumer subjects cultivate with video game consoles is built on the simple, psychological allure of commodification hanging by

Chapter Two

81

a lure of substitutive satisfaction. They sell repeatable ‘therapeutic’ bursts of self-determination—a means to satisfy those higher level, existential concerns out of a nihilism that it would be foolish to expect the material conditions of one’s life to change for the better. And most beautiful perhaps is the fact that the person is no longer burdened with the guilty consciousness of having been the one to make that choice to sprint for the pleasurable in the face of the painfully real—the gadgetized relation is so normalized that the mediation on its own secures the organization of one’s investment into the relationality. In other words, the very device-ness of the video game gadget—the console, the controller, the headset, the television screen—pacifies the person to compulsively abide by the core concept of the capitalist ideology covering over material reality—the commodity form is supreme. As Rosedale, the founder of Lindenlabs, the company behind Second Life, once put it: what we’ll look back on now in Second Life will have been the beginning of a proof that things are real because they're there with us, and we believe in them and if they’re simulated on a digital computer versus sort of simulated by atoms and molecules, it doesn’t make any difference to us.9

9. The grammar—the sense of time and his use of tenses— how fittingly ouroboric! This quote comes from an interview with Rosedale, which comes up in Spingarn-Koff’s 2010 documentary, Life 2.0.

is, being self-aware as a subject, etc.). Hence the amalgam of an avatar-subject comes to be constructed in a game, and an idealized version of it begins to take shape through most valorized fragments of most cherished game experience. As a subject-position that the person can return to any time that the subject-positions he has to occupy in the real world disappoint, the gaming apparatus serves as a container for (re)orienting of subjecthood necessary for the reproduction of consumption. In order for the notion of banal ‘new-media entertainment’ to bypass any critical faculties, we would have to assume that there is nothing concerning about deriving satisfaction from commercial images and sounds without concrete materiality. The fact that we have hardly begun to view consumer object relations in this is an indicator among others that the ideology of banality surrounding technological mediation is a lot deeper than expected. After all, a person’s experience with video games exists in a world already saturated by an ideology of consumer entertainment.

I will contend that gaming opens up to a psycho-social dimension of the consumer libidinal economy. Capital disciplines the subject ideologically despite the possibility of his existential consciousness. Capital regulates his libidinal economy by manufacturing and prefiguring the objects of his attachment. Its method is figured by its mediative technology that can tap into realms where ideologically important psycho-social relation processes occur in a person’s process of subjectification (that

Psycho-Politics of Consumer Technology Part of the problem of is that capitalism has become naturalized so much so that identifying with an avatar can be celebrated as empowerment even though it operates in a capitalist economy, where both the technical means of mediation and the program underwriting the avatar-subject identification are implicated in an exploitative cabal. Across gaming studies, and even media studies writ large, deeper concerns over the nature of consumer mediation and its effects on the paradigms of subject-formation are absent from the discussion. And this absence might be explained by the fact that such deeper concerns would question the nature of subjectivity or consciousness sustained and promoted by the mediated commercial environments; it would

82

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

83

mean asking for a psycho-political discourse on gaming, which, in turn, would raise questions on the reality of the colonization of experience by and for commodification and exploitation. The discourse with consumer technology is still in its infancy, because technology remains idealized. When technology makes a showing in the public, it is in its sanitized, future-oriented form that distracts away from any signs of its present profit-extracting utility. Perhaps scholars are prevented from having politics, because they, too, are ideologically-constituted subjects. A theory of technology devoid of most far-fetched political considerations (that is, its possible repercussions on the libidinal economy and the quality of one’s self-consciousness) is prone to serve the reproduction of the historical economic interests, whether those are in service to or against the interest of its subjugated humanity. Since the first time we were introduced to philosophy, we were told to repress the desire to ask questions about superstructures. But, now is a critical time to articulate those: what happens to the human as it is led through the chronologically overlaid domains of socialization? What is the effect of such standardization on the nature of subjectivity? What happens in the particular context of consumer capitalism when the individual is ever more so systematically contained that the flow of his libidinal life is increasingly more predictable and commodifiable? An apolitical theory of technology offers no answer to these questions, because it views technology only as a tool of humanity where humanity is historically relative, but essentially hardwired to its nature—and its nature, well, its definition has always been relative to the dominant political economy. We can uncover the grounds on which no matter what the intended dimension of experience (whether social or psychological) or the intent of mediation (exploitation or cultivation), we can treat technology as

84

The Loot Loop

10. It is very likely the source of the ever-so-ephemeral surplus for the foreseeable future. The mechanism of surplus-extraction performs its functions on the back of the process, which the person would have used to cultivate self-consciousness. See Kordela (2012). In her book on Lacan and Spinoza’s conception of surplus, Kordela discusses the power of surplus to act as a semiological locator of capitalist extraction—it defines the territory. (More on this subject in Chapter Six.)

that which enables a particular ideologically-constituted, productive syncing of the subjective with the economic structures of social production and reproduction. Technology is not disinterested; it is intimately interconnected with the processes of the dominant historical political economy whether or not its interconnection and dependency are deliberate. In other words, we need to look at technology as a tool for manipulation and psychological molding in a way that acknowledges that education and socialization have both been forms of social technology for reproduction and direction of human development towards fulfilling the needs of a given historical society. The Player-Avatar-Subject as a Consumer Games in which players constitute their in-game presence through avatars become the grounds for people to habitually replenish and internalize the subjects necessary to fit the modes of relations under the reigning capital models. In fact we can see avatarization as a prosumer technology—a psycho-technology to anchor and reproduce a specific subjectivity. The psycho-social relation, the very process of identification, enables this exploitation.10 But, why would a person want to identify as a gamer subject in the first place? The question of motivation raises the question of the libidinal/ psycho-social economy existing beneath the surface and circulating through all the walks of everyday life, streams condensing as subject positions. In order to create gamer motivation, mediative technology builds on historical structures of psycho-social institutionalization. Its recipe for fueling the cathectic costs of attention-capture rests on already structured psychical territory, one in which ideology, the colonized interiority or the socialized self, functions to (re)territorialize a person’s existential capacity towards the given historical political economy. Following this

Chapter Two

85

logic, the game-engine has to qualitatively match ways of being in the world, which can only be achieved if the game-makers tune his in-game designs to the qualitative standards to which the person, who already thinks of himself as some political economic amalgam of a subject, is already accustomed. It is not enough that the game succeeds in accounting for the potential desires of investment and expression, the game-engine also has to make sure that the participant’s agency is simulated in proportion to how he might value his agency in his wider historical political economic subjecthood. What we are after is a certain tightening effect of televisual commodification. With the decrease in obvious means of exploitation, capital (having become increasingly streamlined to respond to the extractive needs of financial capital) has given rise to gaming as an emerging means of profiting from the ways in which persons relate to objects in their lives. A process that goes by different names, but is generally distinguished as belonging to the realm of ideology, that is, the story people tell themselves in order to tolerate the world they have to live in, or socialization, as how they are trained to reproduce the social. Thus, a video game is an instance of a particular model of psychological engagement for consumption; it is only one aspect of a larger structural trend in consumer capitalism in which televisual mediation and its technical interactivity take center stage in the perpetuation of the consumer-side of the global political economy. The relationships that a person comes to develop with a video game device acts as a means of structuring, condensing intentionality into specifically-communicated relations. For instance, in the very process of plugging into the console, a person accepts the limitations of being a gamer subject, first by the means of embracing the control pad, then continued by following all the onscreen instructions.

86

The Loot Loop

11. “VGHS.” Television show. 2009-2011. Canada. Since 2009, the series has resurfaced on YouTube (2014).

Videogame High School One site where bits of the problematics we have been chasing in this chapter crystallize in an instance of popular culture is the short-lived television show, the Videogame High School (VGHS).11 Produced for millennial Canadian adolescents, the series originally ran for two seasons starting in 2009. The producers of the show could have merely intended to update the familiar high school sitcom format for contemporary “digital native” audiences. But, the show reveals ideological fantasies that normalize the digital mediative regiment. In the future-present universe, the high school is an elite educational institution in a world organized by a video game political economy so much so that professional video game players, who “earn millions,” have long become legends that mobilize intramural competition. The ideology of competition promotes immersion in the many mediations in the hallways of the school. It is by total dedication to the regiment that the students attain their will to power. It is the key to accumulation and class mobility, all perfectly symbolized by shots of an actual scoreboard in the school’s atrium (the students at the bottom of the scoreboard are expelled at the end of every semester); the competition is always an unavoidable given. The series’ pilot episode opens with a scene from a news television show, in which an anchorman informs the audience of an ongoing first-person-shooter battle in a generic war-torn Middle-Eastern urban scenario. In this world, culture whimsically embodies the objectives of social-reproductive institutions: the gaming industry runs the school, and seems to have directly produced the curricula; the evening news hour has been thoroughly reduced to a gaming review show, which merely provides updates about the never-ending competition. There is no observable contradiction in consumption being readily presented as the only incentive

Chapter Two

87

in tolerating instruction and examination. Otherwise, neither the state nor any other social institution exist--neither parenting for that matter. Transgenerationality, the presence of adults in the narrative lives of the teenager sitcom, shows up only as the perspectival difference between adults and teens. The parents are represented as either nihilistic and misanthropic, addicted to MMOs (it is implied that this is a result of their not being “natives” to the technological regime), or crazed by a lifetime within the competition economy. There is no science, no humanities, no fine arts courses. From the start students are portrayed as completely immersed in various genres of gaming. And if they are not, they are identified with characterological goals and personas. The various gaming genres seem to naturally correspond to the existing socially-procured character types of the students, which, the clique-nature of institutionalized education guarantees. The geeks are naturally geared for excelling in strategy games, the spastic for the fighting and racing, and the popular kids, whose lives provide the main narrative thrust in the series, for the first-person-shooters. Interestingly enough, the shooter-jocks are the only group that already knew their proclivity for the labor they must perform as gamers. The school work is still repetitive, as competition requires practice, but the rewards are immediate, because good grades are marks of good gaming, which is also ‘cool.’ And when the action is displeasurable, gaming is still justified in its future economic value; all the while the peer-driven sociality justifies the laboring. After all, the adults might be watching, and it is obvious to the interpellated that games are valuable because they are fun, a point that needs no embellishment. The consumerizing psycho-technical mechanism, as functioning in the player-avatar relation, reappro-

priates an already existing psycho-social mechanism of valorization. For instance, the experience of the televisual has already been married with its gamified contemporary form. The extension and folding of the audience labor (to draw satisfaction from identifying with the televisual) into gaming has already grown into popular phenomena observable in internet culture—Twitch.tv is nothing but monetized channels for viewers to watch someone else play a video game, and pay them on their own volition. The popularity of passive audiencing of gaming is not surprising either. It reflects the continuation of an already established psychological relation in mediation, which in passivity, becomes relaxing as opposed to laborious within the immersive paradigm of habituated game worlds. In watching someone else play a video game the avatar-experience allows the viewer to identify with the streamer’s avatar, working as a vehicle for redeployment of auto-stimulation. This auto-stimulation is different from social and psychical stimulation. There is a difference between stimulation in which the thrust of affect stems from the external world in contrast to regimes of televisual affectation in which a subject participates in stimulating himself by participating in the internalization and identification with the symbolically represented on-screen stimuli. Of central importance is that the audience experiences this fluidity between their gaming and the traditionally televisual experience as pleasurable in the downtime of their own gaming—in those moments when the gamer is perhaps cognitively exhausted. In this way labor can be doubled within the simulations of simulations. Since the game-playing subject is behind the veil of the avatar, it is easy for the audiencing subject (who is otherwise also a gamer) to identify with the gameplay of another. In this way watching the gameplay

88

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

89

becomes a way of extending the moment in which he is present, passively watching himself continue to partake in a task already habituated as (ideologically and mechanically) satisfying. The way the consumer culture has normalized and extended the mediation through consumer-grade gadgets gives rise to the possibility that the once opaque processes like identification and repression believed to be beyond manipulation of class consciousness have in fact become tools of reproducing regimes of regulation. It is in the unconsciousness, in the assumption of the platform’s disinterested mediation, in its capacity to foster habituation, that the opportunity for smuggling processes of economic exploitation emerge. As materialized ideology, the ideologue is tasked with embodying the subject as a gamer—someone who confines himself to the self-awareness of a gamer always limited to maximizing the pleasures within the boundaries of the game. His ideological sense of self is fixed around basic economic interactivity—to win, gather, achieve, accumulate, and with praise-worthy style if possible. Through such banal protocols becoming activities with strong registers in the libidinal economy, gaming becomes an institution of socialization on the back of ideology-as-anapparatus. Almost ironically, weaponized ideology as such also exploits an other—drawing its power from the perpetual motion in the instilled necessity to constitute oneself as a subject. Since there is always a psychic motivation that propels a person to identify with an objectified and idealized subject, the quality of this motivation is what offers satisfaction—even if it is ultimately Pavlovian, that is, habituated and affective in nature. At this stage the satisfaction is still strictly ideological, because of the nature of televisual (re)presentation and simulation. There are no real objects that stimulate the body of the gamer; the gamer must immerse himself in the

game to bring about the necessary auto-stimulation. The game’s immersiveness depends on its technology of valuation—in this case, the historical paradigm of the televisual. Its method of immersion needs to extend from the established affectation of its psychosocial predecessors of the television, the radio, or the printed text’s accomplishments in alienation, commodification, and recirculation. The game affectively (that is, qualitatively) replaces the original fantasy, which is most likely a familially internalized one, offering its own objectified and reproducible version. Its operationalized identification works by employing the socialized desire for satisfaction to create the motivation for the continuation of engagement in the process of consumption, which, after a period of initial runs, comes to be seen as a structure of production on its own to warrant being called (re)productiveconsumption or prosumption as it is generally known. Consumer technology is not an innocent conduit. The material gadget mediates the relation between a person and his construction of subjectivity on the screen. As a mediator, the gadget directs and shapes the relation. And as a commodity within the circuits of consumer capitalism, the gadget comes to secure the commodification and profitability in the very process of mediation. Basic psycho-social processes implicated in the regular formation and regulation of perception and consciousness, work and enjoyment, become fair game for being fitted into a profit stream when mediated by gadgets. And it is this reification of socialization and ideology—that is, the domain of the psycho-social relations turned into technologies by way of mediation—which also become reified as combined bits of affective auto-stimulation (more on this in the chapters to come). The problem then is the technological redirection of what passed as ideology and its subject formative role toward the creation of consumer socialization for

90

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

91

the purpose of cultivating consumer subjectivity. But, because the mediation occurs as a planned relation in an exploitative scheme (getting people to buy your things and identify with your brand), this new technology acts to repress, and not liberate as advertised. Its repressive character stems from its reduction of iconographic identification with social authority (as traditional, primary identification) in the process of commodification; reducing consciousness to attention for immersion and other-directed attention-formation, and satisfaction to bodily-affected sensation symbolized by commodity-relations.

In the following chapters I will specify WoW as a historical site of coalescence of the adolescents’ subjective experience, at which we can interrogate the reproduction of consumer subjects. Gaming envelops historical experiences of the social through its interactivity. MMOs are played in real time with other human subjects; the mode of interaction is ‘role-play,’ meaning that players are engaging in performative interactions with other players. In essence, WoW enforces its own version of the subject. Mediated identification works to the extent that a person thinks of himself as a self-directed and self-realizing subject. To be a WoW player, one must adopt a digital avatar, ‘hailing’ himself as an embodied subject while simultaneously following a projection of ‘himself’ on the digital platform. This phenomenon acts as a secondary identification much akin to how institutionalization and peer-group indoctrination serves as secondary socialization. Thus, there are two questions at the outset: does WoW, as an institution of socialization, differ from other modes of so-called traditional socialization (the family, the factory, etc.)? And, how

does interacting with virtual reality (re)produce forms of subjectivity? In other words, what are the political implications of reading the subject-avatar across the dimensions of psycho-sociality, and in relation to the already-existing primary psycho-social processes? It is the task of social theory to determine how this historically-specific ideological apparatus enforces its vision of subjectivity, and what this regime of enforcement means for youth. From their scenario to their rules and basic engineering, video games rely on concretizing the dominant historical ideology to create immersion. The new trend in gaming points to the fact that the industry is becoming keen to this fact. And as an industry, it suggests that the larger structure is beginning to valorize it as well. The open-world games and massively multiplayer online games make the operationalization of ideological relations a complete process, because they resemble complete worlds. In these so-called worlds, a person can ‘live’ through an avatar provided that he accepts the rules of the game through which he is hailed as a subject in the game. As a game puts demands on players for a specific objective, the kind of labor its code values stems from (al)ready-made ideological assumptions. With no ability to cheat the total system, all player action is forced to abide by the programmed discipline of how an action will take, and how that in-game action will be valued. Always a force of economization, this time/value economy in a game operates in compliance to its lore (its ideology) that sustains the rational interest in the game to perform within its created economy. The game might ask that one accept a subject-position of a colonial settler on the way to the New World (like in the strategy game Empire: Total War), or a newly minted human ‘paladin’ (game-speak for a religious

92

Chapter Two

***

The Loot Loop

93

knight) with self-righteousness reminiscent of the Christian crusaders (as in the MMO the World of Warcraft). In the context of the game, these identifications are valorized ideologically by refracting axiomatically through the identifications from older consumer media iconography as well as the ideals still persisting on the back of the remaining vestiges of patriarchal symbolics. After all, the player, as the subject in the game, must be justified in the actions he must take to win no matter how unethical the premise of the game's scenario might be. Part of the process of the socialized self-self identification is the imposition of the ideological context through which the person reads and constitutes in his head in the process of imagining his own subjection. Here the gaming industry can be viewed as relying on the commodification of players’ agency to secure ongoing profits from their investment in their experience as avatar-subjects. For my purposes, it is the technique of subjection, rather than the implications of such content-based depoliticization that is of interest. It seems that there is a psycho-social compromise stricken by the consumer society to appease its subjects that it must create. Operating on a psychic level where basic processes of object-relations (those of psychology of valorization) take place, the consumer subjectivity lived through a sequence of avatar-subjects offers an immersive libidinal economy of lack and a complimenting political economy of indebtedness. After all, the generation ‘gamer’ and the generation ‘liquid-credit’ are one and the same. As if it was a consequence of the gravity well of the moral universe, while the global south lives under the regime of vulgarly violent, dispossessing accumulation of globalized capital, the populations on the home fronts of global capital are relegated to the task of servicing the political economic flows by reproducing their

own consumption of commodities. They are subjected to ideological exploitation of their libidinal lives for this purpose. The terms of their subjectivity, their object relations are social in origin, so it is not difficult to imagine how whoever controls the likely points of registers of affect also holds the power to predict the likely flow of affectation as well as how its habit-cultivated predictability is to be exploited. Thus, object-relations are liberalized (or deterritorialized) as a result of commodification through interpellative relations with consumer technology gadgets. This specific gadgetized deployment of object-relations liberalization leads to desiring lack, a form of commodified alienation.

94

Chapter Two

The Loot Loop

95

Chapter Three Industrial application of psycho-technology

1. Some research focuses on the nature of attention-formation in video games, but fails to follow through to any deeper consequence—the research often fixates on the findings’ relevance to industrial and consumer psychology. Other research focuses on the question of addiction, positing that addiction to gameplay is related to psycho-social histories, and that it results in weakening social relations. This research only extends its concern to the way in which more time in the game takes away from traditional social investments. Still other research looks at the nature of diverse participant motivation and behavior in more social video games such as what motivates them to stay, why and how they participate, and what this means for identity formation. But, as in the former two groups, these researchers limit their conclusions to observations of heterogeneity as a phenomenon to be documented and described. Take for example what has been called the “Proteus effect” of immersing oneself in an MMO.

By and large, the social research dealing with the subjective experience of being a gamer, of gaming, approaches the topic rather uncritically.1 The problem with the existing literature on modern gaming experience lies dormant in the researchers’ operating assumptions. They treat the very notion of fantasy as without consequence, suggesting that its relation is therapeutic. As technology studies generally wallow in the crevices of the consumer economy, there has been at least one serious political ramification: fantasy-commodification has retreated from publicity, unexposed in its already ideologically purified form. Participating in the game is merely the next logical step in becoming more efficiently incorporated into the political economy, which in this case is the progressive incorporation into the modern streams of consumption—electricity, computer products, software, in-game objects, subscription, labor economy, domestic economy, gender politics, race and class politics, object-relations and scarcity, etc. What if the role of consumerizing of desire is to (affectively) allow the participating person to have a deterritorialized experience of the social—to get as close to reality as possible without it being the real world of repercussions and consequences? In the initial phase, television became socialized as the regulative

mediator of libidinal relations between the consumer subject and economy. Thus, the gadget became the filter—the regular affective participant in the definition of the allotted experience. It is repressive, because the sense of the quality of an affect or experience that is not translated from real experience into a televisual form is either cast aside to be ignored, or, in the more likely scenario, transformed to a reduced form fitting the televisual’s. To state it directly, I intend to explore the connection between modern consumer capitalism and the dawn of the game-subjects. Let us be reminded that consumers matter. As a matter of fact, Forbes magazine quoted Larry Summers (one of the chief architects of contemporary capitalist economy) as saying that “[the U.S. production] lacks demand sufficient enough for consumers to drive the economic growth at a faster pace.”2 This is only to remind us that considering the psychology of gaming in the context of ideology and political subjugation is fitting, because the capitalist economy of commodity consumption requires not merely efficient and cost-effective production, but anticipation, cultivation, and prolonging the demand to consume those commodities. By tracing the flow of identifiable psycho-social processes, we can locate and describe what of socially-reproductive mechanisms is commodified by consumerization—that is, what aspects of psycho-sociality are reemployed. And even more importantly, we are also enabled to study the impact of such structuration on the qualitative experience of subjugated subjectivity. The Necessity of Fetishizing Small Differences in Loot Games Let us begin by returning to the argument that the process of commodification is repressive. The economy of consumption sacrifices the quality of experience, be-

cause it derives its symbols from a finite, historical culture. Commodification, the reducing of the value of an object to whatever is reproducible, quantifiable, and profitable, is repressive, because it is an experience limited to what can be televisually captured, affectively loaded, and then transmitted through the medium. Therefore, it must eventually recycle its symbols over the course of production and consumption. Our operative example for this discussion will be modern video games with a common denominator—the reduction of experience to what can be technologically reproduced by code and corresponding keystrokes. Reproducibility is a central factor in the tailoring of the MMO (massively multiplayer open world) experience because of its considerable atomic weight in the capitalist economy. Reproducibility normalizes across the commodity’s needs for equalization, regulation, and horizontalization of experience. This principle qualifies the folly of commodity mediation—it is necessarily repressive, because it must secure reproduction. And its repressive character is objectionable because it defines the parameters and quality of social relations in the capitalist exploitation.3 The basic phenomenological setup of how a person plays an MMO game offers a fitting example. If we track the aesthetics of the experience of how a gamer-subject relates to an avatar, and correlate it with how the World of Warcraft as a reflexive system for exploitation has responded to preserve and prolong the baseline of this relationality. In long-term view, how one develops their avatar in WoW has changed dramatically, but if one happened to be one of the 3-5 million players who have been investing their time into the game since its conception, that change would seem incremental, detail-oriented, but steady, and variably rewarding. What we encounter is a drawn-out, tedious process of habituating the gamer to a specific form of commodity-fetish-

98

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

The researcher arguing for the theory’s relevance argues that the creation of an avatar with certain characteristics can change the behavior and self-perceptions of the individual. This article and the literature which follows in its logic often fixate on allegedly positive psychosocial impacts such as empowerment through gender selection and increased self-confidence through the creation of a desired three dimensional body. But, all of these approaches ass-ume an uncritical liberal relativism towards the subject of their analysis. More importantly, they accept consumer technology as playing the part of an uninterested mediator, as if the medium was not a product of venture capitalism. 2. Forbes (2013).

3. See Marcuse (1968), p. 81. It will be helpful to consider a distinction Marcuse offers when he differentiates between primary and surplus repression. Primary repression is unavoidable as it prepares the young child for the process of socialization. As for surplus repression, the difference is that it is not of necessity or lack of alternatives that it is deployed—it is for the sake of exploitation. Additionally, surplus repression acts as a container that enables the thingification or commodification of human activity and the very pieces of how one comes to valorize his waking life.

99

ism: fetishizing small differences in televisual symbols to simulate the sense of something psychologically (affectively or emotionally) valuable, which the person will then reproduce internally through a fitting subject. The repetition and regularity are not limited to the game’s beginning and end; all of the interactive features in the environment within the game world are regulated—in the least bit because the internal economy of the game must be kept balanced. They repeat beyond the semblance of their aesthetic forms, which, in turn, foster repetition, which is also repurposed and circulated. In this sense we can see the MMO experience as a consumer technological response to the need to perpetuate demand-creation. As we will discuss shortly, I will argue that the MMO is an example, and just an example of a larger trend in the most commercially popular modern video gaming. MMO games are networked, made-massive open-world games. What differentiates them comes down to the amount of capital a gaming company decides to invest in updating a game with new content—MMOs, because they cost more to play, have historically tended to have more regularly updated worlds (although, as we will discuss in chapter five, Grand Theft Auto V is an exception). Nonetheless, MMOs and open-world games are both specific shapes of loot loop games—games that provide a simulation of a contained world, a consistent subject position, and a semblance of ideology and sociality. Loot games utilize the magic of repetition to create the habit for fetishizing of small aesthetic differences, which is necessary for continued symbolic consumption. This primary psycho-technology deployed in loot games also speaks to the intent, the industrial effort to control the flow of consumer demand and immersion. Since its creation in 2003 World of Warcraft (WoW) has been one of the most popular massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs). Additionally, WoW

in particular has been the subject of a large body of social research as a phenomenon of “new sociality,” which made it a good candidate for in-depth consideration. Contrary to popular perception, I do not believe WoW offers a new world. Instead, my contention is that WoW distorts and reorganizes the already existing, familiar historical-political reality in order to seduce the attentiveness of the players for the purpose of furthering their immersion, and thus, consumption (which in this context is their continued participation in in-game laboring that passes for play that they must pay for both in investment and money). Consumer society has singularly offered the choice of commodities in place of qualitatively personal ways to social life. In time it has come to rely on a technological apparatus to monitor and analyze the libidinal value potential, realized, and lost in individuals. In turn, individuals, now reduced to habits of apolitical scurrying around only to be collected into emotionally-regulated conscious subjectivities at predetermined points throughout any given day, find refuge in WoW’s world, where the primary obstetric political contradiction between structure, that is, predictability, and personal freedom, that is autonomy and self-determination, is virtually resolved. In WoW, every gamer is a consumer subject. WoW deploys a characterology of the subject most briskly captured in the image of the Ayn-Randian hero: a subject that embodies a selfinterestedness of the most strictly economic nature at the nexus of his existential matrix. There are a number of important questions left unaddressed. If WoW, as an instance of a much-wider MMO paradigm, is viewed as a psycho-technological apparatus, then, because ideology serves to satisfy the person in their inescapable subjugation to the political economy, can WoW be seen to operate on the level of players’ fantasy and desire? Namely, how does WoW as a commodity and an experience of simulation re-

100

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

101

late to ideology and socialization? What does it mean for critical theory that an ideologically-bound subject might enter another sphere of economic performativity (as yet another subject)? Is there a social and political importance to this avatar-subject relation? The Reproducible Allure of the New Blizzard-Activision, the company behind WoW, has periodically released expansions to provide new content for the original game. These content updates embody the intent to extend the game's intrigue for the habituated gamers and its attractiveness to newcomers. More often than not it has meant incorporating more of the historically-commodified popular culture into its game content to enhance the depth and relevance of its fantasy. In 2013 alone there were two major expansions to the game, historically an unprecedented move for Blizzard-Activision at that time. The releases represent a popular trend in the way the gaming industry initially approached the need to replenish the modes of satisfaction in the digital consumer economy. Habituation alone was not going to guarantee the profitability of the game any longer as gamers could opt in for another commercial fantasy. So, we could say that the content expansion represents the visual surface of the larger campaign to prolong the gamers’ immersive play. It is an example of the contemporary capitalist reflex that organizes the consumer libidinal economy: persons-as-players-as-consumers need to be supplied with the psycho-technics to replenish the affective pull of their consumer object relations. Around the same point, the commodity to which they are libidinally bound needs to perpetuate the sustainment of psycho-social relations that reproduce the circulation of consumption by offering relics of the real (always new, but familiar) in the virtual for their identification.

The first of the two aforementioned expansions featured the addition of a new in-game territory called Pandaria. This new continent introduced playable panda-like avatar prototypes, which players could use to establish the identificatory foundations of their avatar-subjectivity. At the time of the release some gaming analysts argued that the release was meant to foster a deeper investment for gamers across Asia. But, it did not necessarily make sense in light of the fact that these avatar types mainly reproduced Western stereotypes of the Oriental. Pandarians were scripted to practice Kung-Fu, engage in Tao-speak, and wear Kimonos. Considering the diversity of approaches to the choice of content in a MMO-styled game, it is apparent that this orientalist caricaturization is rather commonplace—and it thinks of itself as banal as any hipsterist contribution to gentrification. Immersive gaming in MMOs borrows from the floating pool of icons, symbols, images, concepts, etc. What is interesting about it is not the orientalism, but the fact that those oriental signs were chosen because they already existed as valorized objects, as signs previously commodified. Whatever the content, it matters a lot less than the fact that it is a new territory by way of hailing through a symbol already instilled in memory, inviting the extension of the already established praxis of fetishizing small aesthetic differences. Newness, the affectively valuable quality of un-anticipatability, is the precious, orienting value in this libidinal market. Let us take up the general aesthetic experience as an illustration. In the course of the gameplay, some 20-30 hours into the game, a player is desensitized to the static encounters with ingame objects, scenarios and environments. At that stage, his attention has been redirected towards tracking the small aesthetic changes in the world that come about in response to the player’s continued labor. A player

102

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

103

is trained to pick up on this subtlety—the affecting begins with the noticeable changes in the aesthetic refinement of one’s own avatar. On the lower, less-demanding levels of the gameplay, the colors of the items (or avatar-gear) accessible to the avatar-subject are duller, the items less exotic-looking and more crudely texturized. They lack refined detail. Substantively within the in-game economy these items are less valuable (both in terms of the in-game experience and the in-game marketplace). They are not visually attractive, as in the gear does not recall a stronger cultural signifier. The aesthetics might be psychologically valued, but the way an item looks seems to correlate to how expensive it is in the free-market auction houses found throughout the game world. In this sense, the avatar-subject relationality functions on the back of a collapsed distinction between the in-game economy of signs, affects, and reward rations, and the libidinal economy of personas, affects, ideologies, desires, fantasies, etc. In contrast, on the higher levels, the players can acquire items for their avatar-subjects that make them look stronger (for example, bulkier gear with flames and spikes—in fact much of the aesthetic-progression is attuned to pop-culture identifications), and add to the avatar-subjects’ abilities and in-game attributes like strength and agility. In this way, the game-expansions mirror the economic necessity of the game-engine to perpetually keep the player working, or ‘leveling up.’ The player subjects himself to a regiment of varied televisual affects and what comes of the complimentarity of the game’s basic gameplay loop to the daily habits of a given person. On the level of the everyday experience of the in-game world, minute changes in the gameplay cocktail and quality of the content accessible to a player are regulated by requiring specific items, or character level. The changes interject where a player is most like-

104

The Loot Loop

4. This proposition also fits the (re)marketing models of many other successful gaming industry ventures such as the WoW predecessor Everquest, the popular open-world franchise Grand Theft Auto, and its first person shooter corollary Fallout. For Everquest, there have been more than fifteen expansions since the original release of the game title. And while the game-engine has remained virtually the same, it is the expansion of the in-game catalogue of objects ready for manipulation that has justified calling each addition a new expansion in the eyes of the players. Not to even mention the body without organs that is the Sims.

ly to begin losing interest in the game, places that are turned into spaces of domesticity in the virtual world— the unchanging spawning pools, the market places, the look-and-feel of the interface. In all these instances it is the aesthetics of the game that always need a new facelift.4 Developmentally speaking, commodity fetishism and its extension—the fetishism of small differences—should be treated as symptoms of internalizing the reigns of commodification—a mark of the foreclosure of self-determined qualitative definition of social experience. The game fosters the necessary psychological motivation in the players by creating sustained intentionality in the experience of the avatar-subject, which itself relies on the attention-stimulating effect of feeding the fetish for differentiation. Fantasy is the realm of the unsublimated or the ‘return of the repressed,’ which is of no political consequence as long as the experience of the consumer subject is merely treated as a tragic waste. Fantasy in its historically situated relation to ideology is the more affording territory. If ideology broadly serves the psycho-social and political function of reproducing the relations that maintain the already existing systems of organization, production, and domination, then gaming’s function in the political economy of consumer capitalism must be seen as capitalizing on the newly privatized psychological domain of mediation, relationality, and identification. What I called the privatization of object relations earlier is precisely this technology of political economic socialization, the cooptation of the psycho-technologies previously only used for the reproduction of histori-cally necessary subjects. In the consumer society, forming relations with onscreen symbols, animations, avatars, and the worlds of fantasies should be treated most critically; as long as its organizing principle is profitable exploitability, the na-

Chapter Three

105

ture of the mediation is necessarily bound to be repressive in intention—it is the holding-back, the regulation of the player’s enjoyment of the game that enables the profit-extracting to continue. As we will discuss shortly, this effort can be achieved by simply simulating otherwise irrelevant relational processes. The privatization of the psychic relations has been an especially important event for the reproduction of the political economy in the postcolonial metropoles. Capitalism mitigates the problem of the falling rate of profitability with increasing reliance on mediative technologies to guarantee prosumption. In contemporary consumer society, this technology plays a critical role in the reproduction of the necessary subject of a consumer society, that of the most suitable consumer—the one who self-commodifies and nulls himself with televisually triggered auto-stimulation (the implications of this event are still ahead of us). Video games cannot supply the physical component of an experience of touch, sight, and sound beyond the scope of its gadgets, instead they have to rely on feeling and affect. The affect hails in the subject, calling forth his presence through all the little ways in which one unconsciously comes to relate to the in-game world through his avatar. All that has to happen is that the person embodyingly reproduces stress or relief at the prospect or because of lacking anticipated actions. The consumer commodity wins just by the gravity of repetition compulsion in the libidinal economy. The repressive character of consumer mediation is about reproducing the consumer, the person, who will seek consumption, internalize its real historical regime, and reproduce by his regiment of self-valorizing—in this particular case, by accepting to play in fantasy according to the political economy of consumption within the totality of the reigning order.

The Anatomy of the Avatar-Subject Relationality Here is a basic primer on the experience of playing a loot game. At the very beginning of the game, the player creates an avatar, which will be his conduit in the game for the remainder of the time. This avatar has a body with all the characteristics of what a person might look like. The player can customize the shape of the avatar’s features from a catalogue of prefabricated variations. After the initial choosing of avatar’s race and gender, the player must then choose the avatar’s in-game class, that is, because the in-game economy reifies labor as violent dispossessive acts—in terms of whether this character will prefer hand-to-hand over distance combat, armor over magic, etc. And, at the beginning of the game, his avatar is risen at the common location of new-player-insertion (every race has its own starting-location or spawning pool). From that point onward, the player interacts with the avatar by means of his keyboard and mouse, or gamepad, where he literally follows the avatar over the shoulder, directing its actions, which are defined and limited by the game-engine. As for how the game is organized, the game-system values the player’s kills as experience points, which continually add up to increase the avatar-subject’s ingame standing. In turn this standing enables the player to have access to a larger part of a predetermined catalogue of fighting capabilities and in-game commodities for his avatar. The game progresses as the avatar-subject travels from place to place, picking up new missions from non-player entities (Non-Playable Characters or NPCs). He may choose to do the missions with other avatar-subjects or venture on alone. These missions educate the player of the game-world’s lore, and act at first as basic training, and later on as means to motivate the player to move along, to experience the arc of the

106

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

107

game’s larger storyline, which serve to rationalize the repetitiveness of available activities. The operating psycho-technology begins to surface at the moment that the avatar character gains its own integrity. In this schema, one spends their time developing a character; the other players one meets know that person solely through and because of this avatar and its standing in the game (the achieved in-game level and power). Those other players express gratitude (or even merely recognize the player) solely because of the status, the grandeur, of that avatar—how powerful it is in the game and what it can do to help other players achieve in return. In-game sociality boils down to means-ends rationality shared across individual player’s singular goals. After all, since the social activity exists in the game as a wholly intentional enterprise, only what is intentionally communicated is acknowledged by other game participants. What the coding of the game system does not account for simply does not make it to the realm of players’ interaction. Therefore, there evolves also a false sense of stability and continuity, because the platform anesthetizes against the recognition of frustration. The player might have his difficult feelings of reacting to the endless repetition and repression all to himself, but others will only interact with his avatar, which communicates its own integrity despite the player’s actual feelings. In every facet of the in-game experience, a player is behaviorally conditioned to identify with the avatar. The longer one plays, the more invested in the character one becomes, partly because of the time and effort needed to progress in the game (the avatar becomes an embodied virtual record of that inescapability), but partly also because of the small jolts of satisfaction gained from surprises of attaining an unanticipated achievement or valuable loot in a post-skirmish gamble, or that of a new

‘skill’. The better one is able to technically understand and mechanically act according to his avatar-subject’s place in the game economy, the better one can timely perform the micro-economic actions that will have a rewarding result. It is all about fetishizing, especially time. The game is tailored to fostering this kind of close-attentiveness—the production-orientation to the in-game experience can mean spending a lot more time on the less-desirable ‘mining’ tasks such as gathering ingredients for a craft, or the more likely, never-ceasing activity of participating in virtual genocide of NPCs to gather more experience (which the gamers have appropriately called ‘grinding’). The more the player monitors where he belongs at his avatar-subject’s level, the more that he can prioritize developing the skills belonging to his class of avatar-subjects, the quicker and stronger the avatar-subject he has invested his efforts into becomes. Gaining the experience to level up his character takes a lot of time. Over the course of 100+ levels, the amount of time spent gathering experience through repetitive tasks (only differentiated by their aesthetic surface) grows exponentially. In the last quarter of the leveling, a player spends anywhere from three days to a week’s time accumulating experience to unlock just a bit more content. The gameplay becomes boring yet the repetition creates its own compulsion and players stay true to their avatar-subjects. Moreover, the game-engine does not reward the player for working and leveling up by merely ‘gifting’ him the items so desired. No, more often than not, as an ideological mirror to the larger consumer apparatus, it only enables the player to buy desired items by giving him access to the sources of experience and coins, which he can accumulate anew through his ingame labor. In this way the player enacts his own avatar-aestheticization, and that gratification distracts him

108

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

109

away from the reality that the endless repetition of the same basic gameplay hides covered by the false promise of cosmetic changes. The avatar-subject identification offers a regiment of affective satisfaction, which ties the subject formation around enjoyment. The player is satisfied by the feelings and reacts pleasurably to the minute changes interspersed in a landscape of repetitive (boring!) labor. As a player continues to invest his time and attention into gathering the experience necessary to reach higher and higher levels, the game-engine rewards his effort by unlocking more enticing gear for his avatar-subject. The actual avatar never changes (he is forever young), but the aesthetic surface of the avatar changes in microscopically noticeable ways, which prolong the immersive affecting. A player becomes increasingly accustomed to anticipating the planned aesthetic changes, and relies on that projection to motivate his in-game laboring. In view of the everyday life, attending to the avatar-subject becomes a job in a virtual economy. In this economy, some players are self-conscious of their job-subjecthood—they mine the most sought-after ingame materials and sell them on the in-game market for coins, which they then turn into dollars and euros in secondary currency exchange markets. Others take the laboring as an inescapable given, and approach the ingame economy as any good ideologue would—they justify it on its merits as a disciplining mechanism. Still others blindly reproduce their proletarian subjection by the nature of their ongoing position as subjects in the economy. The diversity of perspectives on the in-game economy goes to underscore the way in which the virtual labor supplies the consumer capitalist economy by reproducing the players’ necessary ideological consciousness as subjects. Obviously, it is the game designers and the makers of the games who actually profit

110

The Loot Loop

5. In some cases, notably in WoW, the game-makers will enact “quality control” mechanisms in the game that surveil the players' communications for potential dissenting disgruntlement against the gameengine. In a growing trend, they even hire social scientists to do that research for them. Ironically perhaps the author himself was employed by a video game company as a psychological researcher while completing this book.

from the players’ ongoing dedication to the game. But, in this equation, the players have to keep each other interested, and convince themselves that their time is well spent and that they are in fact having a good time, that their time and their attention spent is well worth it. This, in turn, guarantees that the political economy of class relations is reproduced in the game. As long as the players act in their interest, they all continue to stay plugged-in; they will accept the terms of in-game habituation and continue to pay the monthly fees, which will supply the game makers with present and future profits. An additional problem emerges especially when future profits figure into the present through securitization— Blizzard-Activision is a publicly traded company. WoW, as an exploitative enterprise, is cognizant of its interests, and the steps its makers take in sustaining its exploitative rationality lead to a feedback mechanism that perpetuates circulation and reproduction under the guise of protecting the system’s longevity.5 *** The psycho-social dimensions of the experience of gameplay is built on the avatar-subject relation. This needs to be treated in light of the fact that the gameplay experience also exists within a business indebted both to digital technological development and consumer capital. Video games are a means for vulgar profitextraction under consumer capitalism as well as a means for ideological consumer-subject and libidinal economic reproduction through the technological reigns of the consumer society. As an extractive apparatus video games appropriate social laboring from traditional socialization, and commodify the social in an effort to fight against the tendency of their profitability to fall under the regime of marginal capitalism. In other words, video games

Chapter Three

111

(and interactive digital mediation writ more broadly) enable the commodification of psycho-sociality: the modification of object relations through new technologies for habit-formation of self-commodifying and predictably consumptive behavior. Over the years, hackers (who, interestingly, want to be a part of the loot game play despite their digital-technology prowess) have invented modifying software (mods) that can automatically perform any one of the myriad of required tasks in the upkeep of the avatar-subject. In fact, Blizzard-Activision paid a record setting €650,000 to a freelance programmer (a self-described “hacker”) to stop the sales of a bot in Germany, which allowed players to hand over the task of the grinding to a computer program. In the words of the reporter, “some games like WoW require you to farm and spend many hours trying to find specific items that can be sold. It is tedious and boring, so many gamers use bots to do it. However, for many games, the use of bots is against the terms of use and companies like Blizzard have banned accounts for using bots.”6 But, why do WoW players tolerate a boring game? And, why would WoW-makers pay such a high price to outlaw the only way for the players to get around the play becoming another site of labor? The short answer is that Blizzard-Activision knows that the players tolerate the mindless repetition, because of the emotional value of their labor. In their emotional economies, work has an affective ‘atomic’ weight—its valorization requires no consciousness to make itself meaningful. And it is this mechanism of valorization, which propels the players towards ever deeper identification with the avatar-subject the longer they submit to the in-game regime of work. In a world where ‘cheating’ becomes virtually impossible, the only course of action for a player (if he wants to play, that is) is that he religiously abides by the call of the avatar-subject’s in-game position. The player becomes only

112

The Loot Loop

6. Ubergizmo (2013).

the supplier of the body, which presses all the right keys in all the right combinations, and goes through the motions determined by the game. In such a strict economy of attentiveness, time becomes the central conduit of valorization in the player’s self-constituting relation with the avatar-subject. Gaming also needs to become an indispensable site of analysis of contemporary capitalism, because it relies on the historically existing social valuation mechanism employed by the earlier harbingers of the consumer society. These mechanisms tie the personal to the political economy. A game’s structuring of experience abides by an internal ideological logic, which means that even though gaming is supposed to be a readily available escape from reality, it nonetheless must reproduce the ways one valorizes his experiences in the existing political economy. The person has to keep his finger on the appropriate key for as long as he wants to see his avatar running (or it might be the case that he has to hold down a combination of keys in order to make this action happen on the screen). There has to be a believable correlation between time and action. In this way the gaming mechanism of incorporation exploits the already existing psychological value of labor in order to create its televisual and identificatory impetus for participant-immersion. The modification works beneath consciousness, and molds agency to get the desired result: getting the subject to act predictably, in sync with the needs of the larger system of consumption. This intention to simulate the aspects of the real that carry attachment and can be accessed remotely works in concert with a psycho-social technology of enabling the modification of behavior towards ‘industrial’ ends. Take for example the basics of televisual mediation and the reduction of experience in the process of the qualitative translation from the real world to the game simulation. When a computer-generated ‘world’

Chapter Three

113

mediates qualitatively subjective experience, no matter how advanced it is, the mediation rests on a platform that must find ways of reducing the real-world experience into things made of computer code. This medium is engineered, and in order to successfully account for the psycho-sociality of desires, it has to already come with a sense of what its target market likes and map out potential desired activities, the reward ratios, the most stimulating combination of activity loops, etc. onto its own medium. In WoW, if a person wants to run in a forest, he thinks of his desire to run, visualizes it as already happening within the existing game-space, but then uses the assigned keys on his computer keyboard to make the action happen on the screen. Such mapping defines the initial commodification of player’s fantasies by the game-engine. The more activities that the game-engine can account for, the more likely it is that the player will invest his time and effort into the game, the better the outcome for the goal of deepening the identificatory dynamic between the player and the avatar-subject, which translate to continual subscriptions and continued reproduction of secondary markets (auction websites, in-game currency exchanges, and game-related internet culture). The avatar-subject identification operates in the background as the player thinks himself a self-directed and self-realizing subject. There is a seamlessness to this consumer contract: you are a subject as long as you are here—a standard experience of consciousness guaranteed. To be a WoW avatar-subject, one must simply adopt a digital avatar. He presumes to hail himself as an embodied subject, simultaneously tying the idea of himself as a subject in the game to a projection of “himself” on the digital screen. This is a second-order identification—to be distinguished from secondary identification. I would argue that we have not seen anything like

this before, because this is (at least initially) an intentional effort by the person who already relates to himself as an amalgam of political-economically reconciled subjects. The intentionality in the act of investing into and maintaining the avatar-subjectivity is so powerful that this act of identification could be said to be as determining, as psychically motivating as the primary identificatory experiences in the familial company. Furthermore, if a person allows himself to be immersed in in-game experience, then it fundamentally means he has accepted the terms of the structural mediation. He has accepted to operate within an in-game economy of attention. He has also accepted the unquestionable prescription of value-defining objective that his in-game time will be more valuable if he cares for his avatar and puts care into every in-game moment. In this process the crucial fact is that he has accepted to build emotional bonds to the televisual objects by submitting his attention and care to the same mediated experience. There is a point at which the player begins to orient his choices based on what is best for the avatar-subject and its in-game record, and it is at this moment that commodified identification surfaces as the operating psycho-technology. This is where self-consciousness beyond the limits of the avatar-subject only gets in the way of performing the tasks needed to efficiently keep up with the avatar-subject's needs—a moment in which the politics of the whole process appear. Mirroring the foundations of the way one was once framed to identify with his holders at the homestead, the success of this commodified identification rests on the indestructibility of the avatar’s existence. This avatar-subject will always be there, and it does not— unlike self-consciousness, which is emotionally exhaustive—need to be consciously conjured up in imagination in order to exist.

114

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

115

The Nature of Commodified Identification I suppose it is by design. Part of what makes MMOs so addictive is they are habit forming and a good community brings people back. It plays into the theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The guild gives me a place to belong and friends to converse with. The tasks and ranks and hunts boost my esteem. The NPCs do love to gush over me, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. It’s these things (love, belonging, esteem) that tend to get displaced when we travel. A lot of the time you’re doing it alone in an almost alien world. It can make you feel pretty small when you realize just how big the world is.7 Originating within confines of the global order of capitalist accumulation, gaming is historically indebted to the amusement industry (the self-styled name for the gambling industry). This historical containment marks the limit of the utopian capacity of gaming as long as its producers think of themselves as an industry first. Proponents of the gaming culture dismiss such a critique on the grounds that gaming is caught in the parallel contradiction of post-industrial bourgeois subjectivity— it offers a bit of gambling and a bit of role-playing of the historically material political economy. But, the truth of the matter is that rewards in a game are unlike gambling wins and losses in real life. The whole endeavor is set up within a predetermined framework. Therefore, beyond the chance desublimation, the in-game rewards have a repressive function, a regulative function in the game of libidinal economization. It is this systemic accounting that I want to take up seriously. From gambling studies we learn that the risk undertaken by the gambler fulfills an existential yearning. Gambling takes away from the person, but each one of the extractions is not comprehensive on its own, because its medium is limited. This is why a gambling

subject can remain socially-recognizable as a historical subject; he is not fragmented absolutely, but aspects of his self-awareness are traded-in for bits of auto-stimulation in consumptive exchanges. But, in gaming, such a control of interpellation by means of mediation is realized that it allows the creation and proliferation of compatible and complicit libidinal economies to sustain and perpetuate the existing political economy, which effectively neutralize the possibility of diverging (pre)consciousness. The fact that players can become addicted to the game is a mark of the constructs’ power to (re)train persons to identify with its structural order and libidinal economy. The gambler, the most widely deployed persona of pathological studies, is marked by a monadic desire of “returning” to a time before alienation from repetition. A desire to return to a timelessness, a loss of consciousness, is also a time of singularity and losing oneself in the play. This is a desire that gets re-kindled by mimesis as well as repetition. In fact, chance is an example of the regularizing effect of commodification in the digital: digital luck is algorithmized, yet players still perceive it as random, fulfilling their wish for the gambler's high. In fact, it is predicated on profitability. Repetition libidinally offers a way to get lost in the repetitive task, to lose sense of industrial time. Therefore, repetition is a key psycho-technological tool. It plays a significant role in the desirability of the gameplay. Often, the question emerges as to why players continue to play when the gameplay is so repetitive, but this question overlooks the possibility that the repetition itself is part of the libidinal economy at play. Repetition and libidinal satisfaction are tied in commodification, as commodification territorializes conception and libidinally loads it. Because affect overtakes consciousness by the level of its immersiveness, it signals a retreat from consciousness, which is enabled through interpellation, which

116

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

7. An anonymous post found in a forum discussion. http:// plusmana.com/mmos-perfecthome-away-home/

117

allows the synchronization of libidinal to symbolic via televisual, resulting in auto-stimulation. Reduction of consciousness to anticipatory reaction-formation is the goal of gaming as sought after by the ideological subjects seeking entertainment. Gamification turns the body into a vessel, within an ideology of timeless repetition. And because it works within a system of strict problem-solving, it deploys only technological rationality, that is, attention without consciousness, a deterritorialized will to power. Awareness of gameplay as gameplay ultimately does not benefit the gamer in his attempt to find a way to game the game. The game-engine satisfies through its micro-transactions which never allow for a constitutive regathering, thus sidestepping the critical consciousness potential in every consumer. Hence why immersion into games can be alternatively viewed as a translocation of consciousness. The historical content of non-presence under the sign of the goal of the political economy for the consumer subject results in the reduction of consciousness to moment-by-moment interpretation of symbols into affect. In gaming it is the content for which the player is paying. He is paying to ideologically make up for the lack in his political economic quality of life; he is paying to forget, to not be there in the real world without a semblance of selfconsciousness of that fact. The desire to lose oneself is not new, but it has been commodified and accounted for in the reproduction of consumer political economy. In relating with the gadget in front of him, a gamer ceases to be stimulated by the world around him. But, even this is not a normative determinant—I am very much sympathetic towards the reading of games as allowing people even if only momentary escape from reality, a soothing libidinal compromise. But that is not what is going on here in these games. This withdrawal, this drawing of attention to look into one's own lap every time free floating con-

sciousness begins to arise under the cover of boredom, is ultimately political for the metropolitan subject, since his politics rest in his subject position as a consumer. To put it another way, the avatar-subject is cultivated as a monad who craves non-presence—a desire for immersion and loss of consciousness. Deleuze and Guattari once hoped that the de-territorialization of the libidinal economy would transform the future direction of capitalism—as a liberation, a kind of postmodern anarchism. It is not apparent that this once liberatory deterritorialization was only a divorcing from any single territory or historical-social referent-loyalty. In fact, it turns out that the monad subject is not interested in liberation; he is a laborer by day and a gambler by night, dependent on the system of reproduction for the instances of auto-stimulation that comfort by repetition. Video games are there to provide emotional and affective stabilization by offering role-playing of the governing technological, exploitative rationality, where all roads lead to predictability and affective responsiveness. There is an immersive effect of what happens when the gratifying points of repressive identification of each intersect or overlap with another. It leads to ubiquitous experience of non-presence of subjecthood, a deliberate de-conscious-ing comparable in libidinal economic weight with that of subjectivity—where the so-called weight is based on libidinal affective value. Gaming historically begins from gambling theorists in the amusement industry, tied to their ideological preoccupation and participatory creation of exploitative immersiveness. And it seems that gaming fulfills its historical ideological role through its capacity for enhancing and reproducing immersion: gaming perpetuates domination by creating the means for subjectification at the cost of self-determination. This is not a far-fetched proposition. After all, to perpetuate itself, capitalism must recycle itself. And it does this around the repro-

118

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

119

duction of the secondary-narcissistic ego, a confused ego that has been directed towards the outside to satisfy itself, which is too bound to the dominant regime of valorization—the people on the home front metropolis give up self-determination on the level of mimesis, simulation, and reduction, in exchange for a dose of the gambler's high. The traditionally social is denied as no longer stimulating enough to churn the dynamo of the psyche at the same time that the people living on the home front have been relegated to the role of ideological, semiological, and affective reproduction of capitalism. The Principles of Psycho-politics What is to come might appear as a non-sequitur, but the introjection is an important one. In essence my political intervention regarding the avatar-subject rests on the concept of self-determination and presence. Presence is best described as own-ness, an existential kind of presence—self-consciousness in which the libidinal and existential concerns of a person are within reach across individual moments of consciousness—the present instance of consciousness empowered to stand with the person against the external pressures of subjugation. What makes a person self-determining is that he can (through his many subjects) take over the role of living through a genealogy of social and ethical compromises and impose a subjective self-repressive structure—what Marcuse termed ego-ideal—it is a liberation beyond all performances. I am still partial to Marcuse’s articulation: In any case, the combination of centralized authority and direct democracy is subject to infinite variations, according to the degree of development. Self-determination will be real to the extent to which the masses have been dissolved into individuals liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and manipulation, capable of knowing and comprehending

120

The Loot Loop

8. Marcuse (1964), p. 252.

the facts and of evaluating the alternatives. In other words, society would be rational and free to the extent to which it is organized, sustained, and reproduced by an essentially new historical Subject.8 Self-consciousness is a mark of political liberation in which one takes a role in establishing the means of secondary (de)sublimation and repression. Given the problem of a priori conception, I only define selfdetermination as the critical pivot negatively: it is not a repressively desublimated experience of formative and operative subjectivity in which the libidinal connections (that is, the object relations) are affectively micro-managed for extractive or other variants of social-productive purposes. Presence and self-determination are important concepts as they remind us that the larger quality of subjectivity is structured by processes of subject formation beyond the reach of a person—a process which happens through moment-to-moment affecting, that is, through socialization and its accomplishments through habituation within the bounds of a person’s self-regulative capacity and the various parties with the power of affective stimulation. Political economic reproduction comes with an ideological component, the habit formed libidinal cathexitation (momentary re-territorialization), which makes the arousal of the self-conscious response (that embodies the possibility of resisting the incorporation into the political economy) unwanted. This is the primary reason why consumer technologies and their paradigm of technological mediative relations do not allow people to attain more autonomous or self-serving agency. Instead, the technological relation fragments experience, and sells ways of coping with the disappointment of commodified relation back to the player.

Chapter Three

121

The Dawn of the Auto-Stimulating Machine In gaming, there is a political and economic capture of subject (re)formation that takes place between two affective states: auto-stimulation and loss of self-consciousness. Repetition creates a regiment of auto-stimulation by promoting identificatory immersion, which satisfies by creating timeless egoism. It is at this point that a politics of the economy of presence (that is, self-consciousness) emerges. The problem arises when auto-stimulation (as affective-preoccupation and immersion into non-presence) becomes habituated and normalized as an anesthetic in the course of the everyday. It leads to something other than political subjectivity because it is privatizing and alienating in the most basic sense. We will look at many of the same gaming phenomena scrutinized by researchers to ponder the reasons for which people find solace in games, but something especially peculiar happens in the context of the game called Minecraft.9 This is a game for which there is a dearth of academic research even though the game has become a part of the everyday economies of middle-class households. Minecraft successfully captures free-flowing attention, and dispenses an affect of satisfying calm as it enables control over building blocks unparalleled by any such attempt in reality—the closest to which could be considered playing with Legos. But, in reality, playing with building blocks always brings with it the problem of accumulation and especially clutter, which smacks of a consequence of consumerization because of its dictum of endless consumption. In such an economy, the person as an individual consumer must find ways of disciplining himself into caring for the vastness of the consumption, and this shows up in the quality of the feelings attached to the sight of clutter. In Minecraft a player can see all of his creations in one place. There is a calming effect of this sort of freedom of detachment and deterioration-free preservation. There

122

The Loot Loop

9. Mojang (2009).

is no dust, no discoloring, no sign of deterioration because of repetitive use. In this sense, gaming erases the necessary confrontation with the Other—we do not have to be human (that is, bodily, natured, selfreflexive and ethical) with the elements, let alone each other. There is a larger loss of qualitative depth of experience in this pseudo-therapeutic possibility as the subject/object experience is reduced in perspective to singularity, interestedness, and playerness. This reduction becomes a problem the more it swallows the world outside itself. Immersion into video games and their own cultures thus results in further misdevelopment in terms of self-cultivating sociality—self, body, subject are misshaped, affectively-molded, even consciously misrecognized, repeatedly interpellated to calm the storm, only self-aware when absolutely necessary or predetermined as pleasurable. What else did we expect to find? The emergent culture of gaming can only provide after-hours escape from the political economy, because ideology and products of the ideal and unreal do not really pleasure or satisfy. Instead they invite auto-stimulation, cultivated in the loss of awareness of subjectivity amidst repetition. On the level of the state and social structures, the only meaningful time is that of habit-formation, since social control is realized when the originally occurring is tricked into replaying itself within the exploitative confines of controlled environments. As far as social research has been able to catalogue, what the repetition engine captures is the desire to grow, to change, to surprise oneself with new bouts of subjectivity, which is the auto-stimulation pleasure that arises from the experience of thriving—this is something that video games in their gameness simulate. But, as it is only a simulation, gamers are enslaved to reproduce conditions, which will perpetuate the game-engine’s ability to trigger the stimulation.

Chapter Three

123

On the Question of Addiction to Avatar-Subjectivity Much has already been laid out across the academic research on the topic of addiction, and more specifically that of adolescent addiction, even though social science tends to treat addiction as a normative problem. I would like to treat addiction as an ideological concept that signals the affective tying of the person’s habits to a particular machinic (automatic) libidinal economy. Consumer object relations hide the fact that the behavioral relational pattern they deploy slides on the spectrum of addictiveness. It is the psychology of addiction, which defines the mechanism used by the experience and direction of socialization in an increasingly privatized commodity-object world. I have combed through a decade of psychological and social research on youth and addiction. According to the various discourses overlapping on the subject, adolescents become addicted because: they are prone to becoming maladjusted narcissists, where the definition of maladjustment invariably rests on social productivity, and not self-self relationality; they have a history of lacking experience in social relations, which makes them prone to further alienation; they have grown up with television, which makes them predictable subjects of culture. These same adolescents are emotionally immature, and have an overt need for audiovisual stimulation. They are depressives, prone to becoming substance users, ADHD kids. Their sociality forms in gaming space, and because of this, they come to depend on the medium. They play with gender and sexuality, but mostly reproduce existing regimes. They use internet games to fight off boredom. They are motivated to stay immersed because of the feelings attached to gaming competition, and this immersion satisfies a craving for social recognition. Adolescents are also reported to be drawn to gaming in the way that adults are drawn to gambling; they

exhibit the classic physical symptoms of addiction. They are prone to addictive behavior, because they supposedly do not yet know how to think, to be logical. They are predominantly located in the American middle class (are white, and male), or at least those are the ones that can afford that consumptive lifestyle. All of these are medical diagnoses with social good always already a stable given. This is all fine and well, but it is curious that in none of these cases is the social structural problematized in any critical manner. How does this amalgamation of symptoms and locations make sense in light of the libidinal economies to which metropolitan adolescents are subjected? Addiction means something important in terms of self-determination—qualitatively it means non-presence, or being transfixed into a hypnotic state of timeless immersion. In this context, presence serves to critique immersion, because immersion is an attempt to affect the economic compromise being performed through technology to replace self-consciousness with encapsulating, phantasmagoric, immersive stimulation. Because my concern is about the consumer-technological subject-formation of one who self-commodifies, I hold on to the value of self-determination as an orienting political concept. With autonomy as a point of reference, what is happening in the socialization of the young is very much a process of affective incorporation through economic determination of object relations. In terms of addiction to gadgetized mediation, the key to understanding is in the relationality with the avatar-subject as strictly habitual, emotional in nature. Put rather shortly, gadgetized identification commodifies psycho-technological mechanisms’ repressiveness by channeling them into its own notions of productivity. This explains why addiction is seen wherever there are users of avatar-subjects. The capture of that basic relationality is in the identification with the object. Af-

124

Chapter Three

The Loot Loop

125

ter all, an object is one-dimensional. An object in stasis has no memory, no feelings, no depth, no qualities of being a being struggling with sentience. And as long as the emotional fixation is sustained, as long as the perspective of the person is fixed, the relationality feeds a sense of contentment via the fixed assured stance of the object-subject. The person can thus ignore the shaky foundations of his own subjectivity. In this way the subject chooses to ignore the existential reality of his everyday life for the always-fleeting affective synchronization with avatar-subject. This is at once the allure and the addictive core of the avatar-subject: it needs to be fed, refreshed and repeated in order to sustain its life in the person’s attention and imagination. As things stand, the operative conciliatory thought is that the maladies of gaming subjectivity are resolved by the extension of the subject-avatar interaction into the wider world through gamification of social-productive practices. But, without reflexive acknowledgment that the video game operationalizes psycho-technology to the effect of horizontalizing the view of the political economic. In gaming, the sociality of competition and the labor/reward algorithms resolve the problem of compensation for subjecting oneself to institutionalized repression and desublimation, where effectively all instances in which repression could lead to unwanted alienation are inoculated against.

126

The Loot Loop

The Loot Loop

127

Chapter Four Adolescent gaming at the advent of psychic labor

As mediative gadgetization of psycho-technology becom es a paradigmatic subject-formative experience, a composite of the psycho-social role of video games begins to emerge in the contemporary picture of capitalist socialization. This broader context is palpable in the normative discourses around the challenges of lived adolescence in terms of social and mental health—that is, adolescent addiction, unproductivity, and anti-sociality. Commodification of socialization becomes particularly observable in the biomedicalized discourse of addiction to gadgets, video games, and particularly the loot games. When we contextualize this theme around an adolescent person who is confronted with a consumer life on the homefront, we gain a perspective on a subject in the way it serves a person to lose himself in consumerist monadism. The subject becomes a psychic container, a system of commodification of socialization mechanism that exploits his immersion. The psycho-technological complex deployed in modern gaming enables a person to have a virtual experience of the reigning ideological conceptions of the dominant political economy. After all an aesthetic experience is mentally-constituted, an affect without the real-world materiality, channeling its energy on the

back of emotionally-loaded representation. In consumption-prolonging ethics, the power-to-buy structures access and capacity-building on all levels. Within consumer-driven structures, social-necessity collapses into economic necessity with the same ideological mantra—if you can afford it, you should have it. In this feedback universe, only player-controlled avatars are people, all others are NPCs (non-player characters, in-game avatars simulating sociality). Similarly, one is rewarded for every action taken towards the universal in-game objectives, growth and accumulation. One must always labor; the act of working for reward is inescapable, and cheating wholly impossible—only the mediating gadget and the subjective experience are constituted on the user side, while everything else is on the server-side. Built on the lowest common denominator, instances of social interaction that occur in-game can evade the looming contradiction of being based and centered around self-interestedness. In fact, players retain a sense of collaboration so much so that it seems the neoliberal ideology has been made real, at least in digital form, where self-interestedness and sharing carry no mutual exclusivity. Thus, selfishness becomes the sole grounds of sociality. In-game, intimacy requires only the performance and semblance of the presence of an Other. Everyone can be beautiful, and has the means to reach that next level if they are willing to pay for it in money or effort. Horizons are just a matter of access, and access is relative to the same two principles. The imagined relationality satisfies materially. What makes the establishment of exploitative socialization most effective is the tautological cover that these are merely games, and that games are harmless fun—that instead we should be focusing on real strife. When primary socializing lessons are experienced in hermetically sealed environments like loot games, commodification-as-socialization rears its head.

In a basic sense the psychological technology which loot games employ to garner motivation in players to habit(u)ate the game world copy that method of exploitation from socialization. It is repetition, that alltoo-familiar silver bullet of habituation. Here, the devil hides in the details of the total phenomenological experience of immersion in a loot game. Video games function to influence and direct gamers’ involvement. Only, they do not do it for traditional ideological reasons of indoctrinating into some ideological institution. Instead, video games embody much more immediate and short-sighted intentions of extraction on the back of exploitation of attention-formation and consciousness-direction, since those have become the new currency in the politico-libidinal economy on the home-front of global capital. Every microscopic mapping of a player’s intent contributes to the composite that will become how sociality is contained, redeployed, and commodified in a loot game. In this chapter my intention is to demonstrate the importance of having a political and psychological theory of the consumer society that can be extended into the material, concrete, and historically situated economy. Consumer capitalism as we know it is multi-stratified, geographically organized, and highly specialized. And ever since its industrial beginnings, it has come to rest on applied science to maximize its yields and anticipate the dialectical possibilities of reaction and reversion. In such an economy caught in such a historical trajectory, the libidinal calls to the collective unconscious (in terms of familiarity with histories of cultural repression) play a determining role in how capital manufactures and reproduces demand for what it commodifies. The problems of socializing the young stem from the fact that the profit-extraction base, which views a society as an amalgamation of individual consumers, reduces the complexity of self-social entanglement to where value

130

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

131

and valuation are legitimated and justified by the bottom line and nothing else (that of the exchange value). Principally and ethically, socialization differs from commodification. A process of becoming a subject for a given community (for membership and for others), socialization also represents how one is trained to become a subject for oneself within his given historicity. Socialization has an element of taking-care, or responsibility for historical sociality. If a person lives through subjugation to the process, he is eventually rewarded with a series of rituals that convince him of his own agency as testament that he is responsible enough to take a stake in social reproduction. Because it is an extraction-driven exploitative process, psychic commodification (such as the previous example of commodified identification) poses a threat to the sanctity of social reproduction, because its exploitative mandate rationalizes a careless approach to the well-being of the subject under its reign, his agency and means for self-perpetuation. This is why social theorists, concerned with the fate of the social, have historically focused on how consumer socialization evades the necessary cultivation of responsibility in intergenerational (reproductive) relations.1 It appears that the general domain of what is thought of as labor—an activity that requires self-repression to endure for the sake of expected material value—is withdrawing behind a consumerist curtain. In the so-called high-tech economy, a survey of condensation across pop culture would make it seem like remedial work is on the way of being phased out by intelligent labor—such as programming and designing in an otherwise networked and gamified society. The celebration, which is still going strong some two decades into the merger, continues to be fueled by the original promise of all the blessings of becoming networked that will come. They await the arrival of the angel of cognitive surplus, a sort of singularized meta-consciousness able

132

The Loot Loop

1. Following the same logic, a number of critical and cultural theorists have conceptualized WoW and other loot games as objects and containers of youth culture. Their concern seems to boil down to the same, rather conservative fear that the more space WoW takes up in the lives of adolescent subjects, the more the medium might encroach on the process of transgenerational anointment of traditional authority figures and institutions (that is, the family, the authority, and the school). But, the limits of this research are clear from the start: they suppose that the old models of socialization are superior to the new consumer-driven mode; that in opposition to traditional (read: natural) and banal forms of authority and social organization, youth are now subjected to interested, economically driven, and corrupting modes of socialization. If it were only a phenomenon feeding on our young…

2. See Huizinga (1955). Huizinga makes this distinction on the basis of play’s libidinal engagement. From there he goes on to study the structures of play and their many anthropological characteristics without revisiting his primary assumption.

to consolidate individuation and the needs of the whole without any negative effect on the former. The reality for the majority of the metropolitan public is that the norm is not intelligent labor, but new de-specialization—ideologically camouflaged remedial labor in service and entertainment sectors at the crucial time that the privatization of psychic relations has signaled the beginning of the brutal colonization of interiority. What has happened is tragic, but only logical. Once the globe was mapped by capital, commodification had to retrace, to remap inwardly, which is when ideology becomes a more pronounced, vulgar presence in the political economy, because it becomes a whole marketplace, a new territory for expansion. This seems to have been the fate of select populations coping with having been born under modern global capital. The more the system succeeds in perpetuating itself, the more that specific groups—the metropolitans—become tasked with consuming and producing perpetual consumptive orientation to sociality, while others are relegated to the task of reproducing the concrete means for the continual gadgetized mediation and commodity-fetishism. Confronting the Ideological Definition of Play Besides the confusion surrounding why we work and how it is valued both psychologically and economically, we also have to attend to the ideological treatment of play. Play is an important concept for the study of gaming, and the concept has been long used as the cover term for psychic laboring across the whole discourse. The vast majority of the scholars thinking about gaming cite the same theory of play as their grounding basic assumption. This is Huizinga’s famous theory of the “magic circle,” which posits an absolute difference between work/labor and play for arguably conciliatory political reasons.2 Perhaps play remains a largely un-

Chapter Four

133

explored territory for the critiques of contemporary political economy, because the reigning views of technology will not recognize its basic psycho-social relation to the human, let alone any palpability to the implications of having habituated mediative technology—and not just a mediating platform at that, but one that feeds off of a conventionalized form of identification with symbols of power. Most theorists seem to be solely concerned with commodities replacing human relations or the televisual medium fragmenting individuals’ capacity for responsible attentiveness to others, which are by this point nothing more than familiar tropes of disgruntlement with the consumer society and the culture industry. On the occasions that play does appear non-ideologically, it is never more than a piece of real estate in the geopolitics of interiority. The problem is best represented with Stiegler’s argument. Among many others, Stiegler has argued that reigns of attention-formation, grounded and operationalized by a society's communications technology function to dictate the way in which essential socially-reproductive attention will be cultivated in intergenerational relations under the banner of maturity. Despite his operationalizing of the term psycho-technology to deconstruct the socialization apparatus, in the end, he does not de-naturalize and politicize the process of subject-formation in primary socialization. Without considering whether his operating assumptions about the sanctity of sociality stem from generational fear of risking youth empowerment beyond the societal confines, he argues that what is necessary is a re-socialization of socializing-institutions, that is, a creation of a deliberate social policy to create and protect social institutions to once again “care” for the human. Play needs to be considered as interactivity, as having an atomic weight in its distractibility in the way it is readily deployed as the panacea against the maladies

of consumer publics. Interactivity brings the concept of play into the realm of laboring for a psychic (emotional, ideological, stimulant) purpose. After all, play is a part of the general therapeutic drive afforded to the child to cope with the repression by the agents of the social reality. In Freud’s classic example of a child playing with a ball while uttering the mantra of “Fort-da” (herethere), the child is thought to be working through to libidinally transform his reaction to separation from his object of satisfaction, presumably his mother—in modern consumer society, smartphones, tablets and surface computers have already begun to take over parts of stimulating work previously done interpersonally by members of the welcoming generation. Marcuse’s return of the repressed makes for a clear warning: people still want a life free of dehumanizing labor in a political economy set to some grander aspirations. The fantasy is appropriated and commodified, then sold back to its producer, the consumers. Games fulfill the fantasy of a life lived another way than by laboring while foreclosing the universe of possibility in fantasy by equating it with the in-game life in avatar-subjectivity. Its real cost is that, instead of self-determination, what players receive is an alternative libidinal relation to labor under a guise of otherworldly agency emancipated beyond the realms of the possible. Sandbox games, games in which players are given relative free-reign over an environment to manipulate objects within, are loot games that demonstrate this principle of how ongoing investment into these games leads to forcing oneself to reproduce immersion—merely because the person becomes dependent on maintaining his relation to the gaming console, the gadget, which mediates his relation to his alter ego. Take for example the casual everyday activity of a gamer in Minecraft. A gamer is thrust into a wild, empty world with the sole objective of procuring raw resources—extraction of val-

134

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

135

ue for further production. First using his hands, then a digging tool, the player accumulates various samples of elements—wood, dirt, stone, sand—with which he then builds a new world. In order to effectuate his desire to make the experience meaningful, he becomes primed to start reproducing more of the semiotically social into the game—that is, parts of his performance principle that stick around as affective residues. In order to do this, he must do the in-game laboring that the game requires. Creation always costs effort and time even in the game. In other words, a player is dropped into an empty world reminiscent of the state of nature which he then populates with his constructions. But, what is telling about the psycho-social apparatus of the game is this: while a player can choose to turn off the onslaught of monsters which come out at the end of every in-game day, he cannot avoid the block-by-block construction that constitutes the basic mode of game-play. Repetition (more so, the habituation of it) secures the on-going valorization of the game in the libidinal economy of the gamer. Minecraft relies on ideology for the player’s continued investment to stay in the game to make itself desirable according to the already existing psycho-social economy of valorization—it is how it comes to be that in open-world games, a player has to labor to play. We can recover a path to a clearing in the critical interjection that potentially transgressive pleasurable experience is usurped to produce new ways of consumption through phantasmagoric immersion. Video game play is mediated by a gaming console, and the play also occurs within games as particular instances of console-mediation. Each level of these mediations is economically tailored. But, the problem is not with the structure of the game per se, but the social and historical overdetermination in which gaming takes place. When games are situated in the context of the consu-

136

The Loot Loop

3. The advanced consumer society offers us a specific instance in the inevitable expansive search for new valorizable things turned into commodities. Globalization of capital leads to consolidation and reclassification of the imperial, domestic political economy (that is, what I will simply call the metropole), since the perpetual search for profits is tied to deterritorialization of labor, which once began with de-nationalization or even denaturalization before that.

mer society, they are exposed as being tools of standardization and manipulation in which gamification actually becomes a transformation of the awareness of laboring by the very engineering of experience. The Metropolitan Consumer Class In the centers of global capital, once differentiated as special places of accumulation, the domestic population is primarily tasked with conspicuous consumption. They are agents responsible for conjuring up new ways of prolonging their own status as consumers, which they accomplish by continual ideological repositioning carried out on subjects’ own volition, and motivated by psycho-technology. A fantasy of a position in the creative industry is the best that consumer society can offer to the masses tasked with such a static role. The making of software, and the using of technology as a means of cognitivization of labor are nothing more than wishful thinking that rationalizes their already assigned role. The fantasy justifies the normalization of extractive objectification of everyday life, particularly for those who cannot dream of becoming programmers, software designers, professional gamers, or professional YouTube personalities, even though ideologically confirming literature readily suggests them as viable futures. But, then again, so does the Video Game High School. When the industries of mass production left the shores of the imperial home base, the primary role of the imperial domestic political economy and its subject population became the reproduction of the mostwidely-employable ideology for the most sustainable consumption practices.3 Thus, the ideology of the middle class consumerism begets a special role in the emerging political economy. On its back the industrial base of production comes to sustain itself through

Chapter Four

137

an economy of commodity-consumption—commodification of the ‘qualitatively human’; it is also why the promise imbedded in the middle class ideology mirrors the consumer ideology. The dawn of financial capital signaled yet another instance of non-productive extraction that was to become a transformative force in the treatment and reproduction of metropolitan labor. As marginal profitability continued to diminish under new pressures, extraction had to further the qualitative transformation of personhood for the sake of efficient sourcing of ‘untapped’ humanity to be turned into the extractible, the potential surplus value that would propel the whole of the ouroboric cycle of prosumption. The resulting feedback-loop was born within the consumption economy as a way of extracting surplus from processes that historically served to further social and cultural reproduction. It takes place on the psycho-dynamic level, and involves the incorporation of symbolic and semiotic homogenization of quality. Consumerism allows for the acculturation of repressive identification, the reconciled (denatured) satisfaction under the reign of class society at the expense of fulfilling the technological capacity to create human autonomy and self-determination. It would be useful to consider Marcuse’s theory of repressive desublimation in thinking through this next bit. His theory comes from a critique of Freud’s theory of repression, where Marcuse argues that Freud does not apply the same primary/secondary leveling to his theory of sublimation— that is, sublimation as a conciliatory act to preserve the desire behind a socially-objected object also has a primary and secondary instantiation. Primary sublimation captures the psycho-social consolidation between the old and the new during early childhood socialization. Secondary sublimation is the sublimation undertaken over the course of the everyday, in the process of

moving between new and old internal objects. As adults, we do not have access to primary processes of sublimation (not at least without the assistance of another); all we have is the secondary. Therefore, politically objectionable, repressive desublimation is the shape taken by secondary desublimation in the consumer society. And in our context, it is desublimation on the way to releasing the regulatively internalized commercial affects within the confines of commodity-relation. The cycle completes itself when the subject reinvests his very psychic surplus into circulation as he returns to the well for another go. This is the realm of televisual “culture” and habituated video game lives. They represent an effort at political economic consolidation that also momentarily resolves the problem at the center of the liberal capitalist order—(re)creating agency for citizenry on the home front without giving rise to the sensibility for autonomy and self-determination, which would inevitably lead to the overthrow of the outdated historical structures. The economy of consumption compromises the quality of subjective experience, because it derives its symbols from a finite, historical culture, and therefore, can only recycle, hybridize, or transmute its symbols. In other words, it matters greatly that play happens in a commodified environment as commodification means that the drive (or the directive, the energy) can be directed, manipulated towards attachment to symbols already floating in greater political economy. This process, which defines the parameters and quality of contemporary social relations, is a repressive one, because its interest is not even of societal necessity but one of capitalist exploitation. Under the capitalist logic, surplus repression acts as a container that enables thingification of human activity and the very pieces of object-valorization. The repetition and regularity are not limited to the points of access; all the interactive features within the commercial environment must be regulat-

138

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

139

ed, fostering repetition, which in turn effectuates alienation, which is also then repurposed and circulated. In other words, what the emergent system needs from the populations on the homefront is mere consumption of the material, and reproduction of the dynamic ideological sense of the existing territory for continued exploitation. Computerization and its extensions through digitization come to secure social mediation via gamification to achieve ideological capture of the way the world is perceived, and how the subjugated populations conceive value and materiality. After all ideology is always embedded in the historical materiality of operative consciousness. In this way, the people of the metropole substantiate their relations under a dominant mental image reinforced through commodities and commodified relations to them. There is an emerging immaterial power structure in the form of operationalized ideology, which is tasked with technically mediating the relation of the subject to his world, and the processes of subject-formation and self-consciousness. In turn, this mediation stabilizes structural tendencies in the circulation by tying production to consumption of value. New Forms of Adolescent Labor In 2007, McKenzie Funk, a reporter for Harper’s magazine at the time, documented his travels in South Korea and China over the public outcry about internet addiction amongst adolescents.4 In a memorable scene, he observed Chinese youth, packed in overcrowded internet-cafes, immersed in MMOs in pursuit of real-life income. They spent more hours than a working-day tapping the same keystrokes, completing mindless ingame tasks that would earn them the in-game coins and goods, which they could then sell to their Western counterparts wishing for a quicker way to more content, and thus more stimulating in-game experience.

Funk’s description is not the only sighting of this phenomenon. In fact, all MMOs (and most loot games) characteristically have internal markets, where players can use real currency to buy in-game currency from other players or the game-providers in exchange for putting in the time and attention to perform the repetitive tasks, which would otherwise amount to amassing in-game money. This in-game currency is then used to purchase in-game commodities and utilities for the players’ ingame characters. Aside from the internal market that exists within these games, the mirroring of the capitalist technological organization is also visible in the time-expenditure/game-advancement/monthly-subscriptionfee accounting of the whole game structure. The extent of vertical alignment of social and economic dynamics glimpsed in the above example is a key characteristic of the landscape of the consumer capitalism under investigation. It is the irony of this play-towork site, which offers a glimpse of the emerging political economic conditions for youth living under advanced consumer capitalism: the Chinese youth are working— the repetitive labor of mouse-clicks and keystrokes is kept up for hours under exhaustive hand-eye coordination that would rival those of a work day, and their ‘play’ generates in-game exchange-value. Then, youth, largely from the metropoles, purchase this game-money with real monetary currency. Seeing themselves as gamers, the consumer youth play the same repetitive game, and perform the same tasks as their Chinese counterparts. But, in a contradiction that exposes the political economy tying the two groups and the two economies they each embody, the Chinese youth are alienated as workers while the American youth are not. The American youth are playing, even though both are doing exactly the same thing. Here, play is not preparation for work, but becomes its substitute, or rather, work substitutes play to preserve its own sensibility.

140

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

4. Funk (2007).

141

My focus is on the youth relegated to finding solace in a consumer life represented by the metropolitan consumers in this twisted political economy. As exploited activity turned into labor, the case seems qualitatively different in contrast to the historically studied types. These young consumers labor ideologically or psychically—they are not laboring for the universal equivalent (money or the exchange) value. But, they presumably labor for a use-value, that is, they hope to consume what they produce even though that something might be immaterial. Are use-values themselves becoming alienated in this digital dimension of advanced capitalism? The classic use-value/exchange-value distinction allows us to theorize the use-value of WoW and Facebook for its users—whether in Marcuse's sense of satisfying a sociallyproduced, consumerist need, or in a more psychoanalytic conception of mimesis and identity formation, alongside the exchange value of the commodity being produced, which is somehow also the individual himself, in digital form. The point is that labor produces both. ‘Social’ media illustrates another crucial dimension of this kind of labor, because it clearly employs the affective habits of young users in its processes. As I have argued previously, the special nature of adolescent consumer identification is that it relies on affective incorporation. Consider the scenario of an adolescent person’s anticipation of what new stimulation he may encounter on the Facebook front page; it is a substantive experience, a hallucination of an expected experience over the Facebook interface. This hallucination, this mental image, is a mimetic object, which is summoned by a consumer-technology object in the external world over the course of prolonged, everyday use. What is more,this psychological, relational process already figures into the value of the political economy in which Facebook operates.

142

The Loot Loop

6. See Flath (2014).

It already seems to be the case that the value of the self-reproducing consumer has already begun to crudely figure into the price of the commodities of their preference. For example, in 2013 Facebook bought a software development company because of its hold on a user base through its freeware application, Whatsapp. As parts of the financial circulation of surplus value, persons as users of social media are already parceled and traded between corporations of the emergent relational markets.6 In this example, Facebook, having become a publicly traded company, must keep growing to upkeep its market value, and thus it must prove its continued accumulation by doing more of what gave it value in the first place: increase its user base. Thus, the prospect of the falling profits is swept under the rug by expanding and immediately subsuming the projected future surplus into maintaining the order of the present. Its repressive character stems from structural limitations of the mediated experience. Representation is not only bound to the activity of the imaginary, but also to the selective-operationalization by the object attached to its meaning (its value) socially. The crucial pivot-point is that the socialized imaginary is also psychical. It is not only structural in the sense of drives or mechanics, but a sensuous-being agent of incorporation that also serves economizing and ideological functions. It remains to be explored how, beyond marketing and consumerism, this laborious activity-which-is-also-socialization syncs with adolescent subject position (the next chapter deals explicitly with this theme). More specifically, it remains to be seen what the substance of adolescent subjectivity is that is commodified as commercialization enters their socialization (the topic of chapter six). My working definition of this kind of labor is psychic labor. The concept attempts to specify think-

Chapter Four

143

ing and self-reflexivity as targets of commodification, the substance which becomes commercialized through commodified identification, gadgetized mediation, etc. Labor, in this sense, is an activity of value-creation on the way to circulation.7 The fact of the matter is that an adolescent user accessing his Facebook account has to accept the commercial backdrop of the medium. The prospect of any socializing is behind the log-in. This is how the dawn of Facebook as social media (or web 2.0) comes to signal an era of capitalism in which a solution to the always already diminishing profits is found in new dimensions of psycho-social integration via digital technological mediation. When this capitalist-controlled social medium provides the grounds for the everyday-socialization for adolescents (the activity of social-relation, social-recognition, and self-narrativization), the commercial format mediates not only socialrelationality but also the adolescent’s relation to his habits of relating to others, including himself across all his subject positions. If Facebook is an adolescent person’s primary medium for socialization following the after-hours of the traditionally institutional form, then the mere fact that the medium is a glorified website already comes to impose experiential limits on the scope of the mediated interaction and its quality. Some theorists have argued that those social conditions change the quality of being a human being—socialized to develop a sense of self not through familial alienation attuned to the historical culture, but through commodification. That is not the whole story. If the venture is profitable, and all indicators point to the affirmative, the investors demand even more profitability. The net result is a continuing increase of pressure for higher affective incorporation, which, for the young subject, means more

144

The Loot Loop

7. Contemporary research on this kind of labor has primarily attended to the alienating effect of its repetition, while ignoring the substance that affects alienation. The more cycles of extraction, the more regular and more particularly defined the labor; its repetitiveness is defined by the capitalist extractors, who become increasingly specialized in the particular substance of their extraction over the lifespan of their chosen media.

repression in the form of increasingly aggressive demand for the extractable. Personal data, social interactions, and cognitive labor are increasingly subject to commodification. But, as the medium shapes the social experience, young people are also subject to extractive regulation, because the format establishes and guides social behavior as commercial intent directs the mediated experience of imagining the social through symbolic representation. This is where gaming in its capacity for capturing interactivity comes into play. I will venture to suggest that this scenario returns us to the familiar concerns about autonomy—the quality of subjective experience. For the adolescents, the future is always a matter of political empowerment. Because the structure identifies youth by their physiological development, the future also represents the concrete quality of that empowerment. In this sense futurity captures the discourse at the intersection of socialization, extraction, and development. I have wondered if this futurity can ground a study of historical valorization as it connects to concrete (yet still psycho-social) relationality and the intergenerational historicity of those relations. My central question is this: what of young people’s life-activity becomes this new labor—the source of value and surplus? What is the nature of the surplus extracted in this economy? What is the substance of this surplus-future, imagination, or the capacity to define value based on non-commodified social relations? These will be the questions for the remainder of the book. At the dawn of the culture industry consolidating fascist tendencies in capitalism with the dominant postwar ideology, critical social theorists argued that the future value of commodification was already consumed in the present, and particularly that this was of most consequence to the fate of bourgeois subjectivity. But what

Chapter Four

145

exactly has been the lasting effect of the culture industry on how we think of labor in postindustrial society?

gadgetized mediation receives a spotlight in popular discourses on the topic. For adolescents, who are always already paired with some sort of a challenge with development, sociality, and productivity, video games tend to be viewed as an annoyance to the productive efforts of the socializing institutions. Games create regimes of distractibility and addiction, transforming what it means to be social and interact socially—which means what exactly? To be socialized as a consumer who thinks only of how to perpetuate consumption? In the consumer society (that is, the society within the confines of the historical capitalist metropoles), the commodity competes with social-reality for psychosocial territory. Like reality, the open-world game works to find a way to be taken seriously. To be effective, it has to be immersive; it must be affective, even if only on momentary basis. An open-world game has to make the player work for the development of his avatar’s agency in an effort to perpetuate its capture of the participant’s attention (and thus its domain over the player's behavioral habits). The in-game labor-value economy is not explained away merely by its role in the extractive intentions of the game-makers, because the gaming logic of an open-world game is imbedded in the allencompassing political economy that ideologically never just gifts agency.

The Extraction of Value For the adolescent, who engages in labor unconsciously (in the process of this mediated ‘socializing’), loot games and social media alike (as only the dominant forms of the reigning psycho-technology regulating the libidinal plane of the consumer society) fine-tune the mechanisms that keep the adolescent’s experience of their own subjectivity within their own commercial circulation to prolong and maximize extraction. Extraction is the concrete historical process by which value is reified and appropriated as the qualitative substance of surplus-power for the circulation of capital. In the remainder of this chapter I intend to explore how this relationship manifests itself in the specific case of laboring and one’s sense of his labor; how a sense of psycho-social dependency is tailored by the televisual mediating apparatus, and also inferred by the adolescent; whether the format produces and perpetuates self-conceptual identification; and, most critically, what the developmental and social-relational implications are of these commercial ventures securing profits by conditioning behavior that not only underpin the consumption but also substantiate teen-life. My sense is that without the consideration of subject formation we cannot see what exactly is happening when persons begin working to construct their own sense of ideological syncing by holding up gaming subjectivities. Technology might appear to herald a new age, but a closer look at young persons’ interaction with the consumer technology exposes contradictions between consumer-technological-mediation and psycho-sociality. Furthermore, it is only in the particular case of the adolescent that a semblance of critical engagement with

The Question of Materiality In order to undertake the work still ahead of us, it will be important to have a theory of labor that locates the psychical activity of valorizing an object or a relation in its productive, economic performance. This is the weakness of analyses of contemporary capitalism that still draw current from Hardt and Negri. While much work has been done in the realm of mapping out the abstraction of labor under increasingly digitized capitalist

146

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

147

flows, cognitive labor has not been successfully consolidated with the traditionally under-thought realm of domesticity. While historically such oversight might have been criticized as merely un-feminist, presently the oversight is a glaring blind spot in terms of understanding the reproduction and fortification of the consumer society. Thus, the role of subject-formation, or that of the subject, in the political economy remains a fog. Without a consideration of the subject-formative dimension, we cannot grasp what is so new and in need of contemplation about gamers’ labor’s immateriality, where the immaterial is not extra-material, but psychic (that is, psycho-social, and object-relational). It is not a thing like information or the tailoring of an affective response, but an instance in the process of object-relations, the shaping of internal diversification and the experiential quality of psycho-social relations. Audience labor and affective labor theories are the closest historical materialist conceptions of current capitalist extraction. Yet they seem unable to adequately address the development of the second-worldly digital consumer medium, let alone the prevalence of large portions of the public living with a dimension of self and social interaction within digital capitalist ventures. It is my sense that the historical limitation of this theoretical work rests in its fixity on the material definition of labor, in which the human activity that is converted into labor has a basic physical or bodily substance—whether that might be the work one does when watching television or the cognition one employs in working on the computer.8 There is a physicality to this dated conception of labor, where even a psychic process like cognition is an activity conceived under the rubric of physical (manual) labor as long as they are activities directly subjected to economic exploitation—psychological and psycho-social (relational) implications are not explored.9 The theory’s

148

The Loot Loop

8. A second limitation seems to come about in the scarce instances in which digital capitalism theory touches upon the intergenerational dimension; the tendency is a loss of sight of the concrete political consequences by becoming distracted by moralizing and valorizing of the past. Not to mention the fact that the popular theory effaces any semblance of a subject out of the same misplaced anti-bourgeoisism. 9. There are a number of qualified conceptions of immaterial labor, but, in all of these instances, the theory of labor is limited to the physical act of laboring. Thus, domestic labor is the labor done by women and children in the household to assist in the reproduction of physical labor power. Performativity is presumed to be the necessary social labor to counterbalance historical ideology. Audience labor is the work that persons consuming televisual media do in the activity of viewing as well as in reacting to advertising. Emotional labor is what workers in the service industry must perform. Cognitive labor is the immaterial labor done when crunching numbers, researching, or writing on the computer, again in exchange for money; affective labor is the its corollary on Internet 2.0 (that is, social media), where users must narrate their own affective characteristics to participate in social networks with or without awareness of the economy within which they work. And, ethical labor is what happens to the social-relational activity when it is translated into the digital medium.

limited capacity for anticipating new kinds of extraction is tied to a historically limited conception of value. The case of adolescents could propel the discourse beyond this conception by shifting focus onto the psycho-social derivatives—the relational as the valued substance. Society requires the incorporation, the employment of persons’ energies—a kind of exploitation, in which something originally and authentically human is specified, reified, and regulated into predictability to be economically directed. If the qualitative can be auctioned off in terms of regulating development towards maximizing future-profitability, then this is basically a futures market! In the first instance, and until the subject protests, this setup resembles the structure of the period of primitive accumulation—taking all and leaving nothing—when capital painfully learns that diminishing returns and proneness to speculative crisis have to be dampened by making the future of extraction presently sustainable to at least allow for the time of regeneration. The existing theoretical work seems to be limited by a vulgar materiality, partly because it rests on an ambiguous conception of a person as an individual or a worker. The concept of the individual implies acceptance of atomism; an individual might have a gender as in the case of the invisibility of domestic labor or the misconception of performativity, but no structurally locatable subjective (or experiential) personhood that could be situated historically. Aside from this social dimension, there is also the dialectics of the political-economic situation of the person and the person in light of the political economy, which has to be reconciled with the conception of human activity turned into labor as limited to a physicality, which focuses on who owns the body. Additionally we have the problem of the contemporary psycho-social theory of subjectivity, which seems to concern only the substitution in which the role previously occupied by generational object-relations is taken

Chapter Four

149

over by consumerizing interest. But, the critical point remains: the political economic situation of young people in the metropole of advanced capitalism employs their experience in its circuits, shaping their ways of valuing in mediated spaces created by and for extractive purposes. Thus what remains invisible is the fact that the quality of psychological experience, the psychosocial process of valorization (or valuing, or value-adding), becomes the substance that enters the circulation in the consumer libidinal. The existing critical theory already speculates that the ready-made takes the place of idiosyncratic conception by means of applied mimesis. It is in the nature of the consumer society that political-economic incorporation of the subject requires the standardization of signification and identification practices—profitability hides in mass production after all. As we have already discussed, research in this area is sparse and disjointed. The ethnographic research that does exist only offers general moralistic critiques of digital culture. In fact, the existing literature tends to rely on Hardt and Negri’s affective labor theory, which seems incapable of addressing the incorporation of the psycho-social dimension precisely because they were too quick to celebrate the growth of a kernel for a way out from within the very processes of consumerization. This is where the consideration of young subjects’ experience advances the critical theory of contemporary society. It challenges precisely the assumptions about the possibilities and the substance of life-quality under advanced capitalism. The everyday lives of young people living within the metropoles of global capital bring a new focus to these critical problems— theirs is a psycho-social experience increasingly regulated by the markets for the sake of consumption, while they are treated as not-yet-fully-formed. After all they are believed to be incapable of self-determination, and

yet their subjectivity is presumed to be an amalgamation of complex psycho-social processes. In a society where conspicuous consumption reigns, its most sacred exploitative practices emerge in the context of how it privately treats minoritized subjects such as these. As a concept, adolescence is defined as a state of being from the outside, which implicates ideological and material definition of value, and, by extension, the structures of the dominant socially-productive exploitation. Adolescence is always a structural identification of a human being, because, unlike childhood, it is a socially defined minority status for the sake of extending the period of secondary socialization, and perhaps even delaying the saturation of the labor market by consciously doing so. In the case of youth the political nature of the psycho-social conditioning of the human gains visibility, because their subjectivity is already subjugated to white-washed objectification. Futurity, as an increasingly indispensable clause of commodification, also figures into the definition and treatment of adolescents. As they are presumed to be only just growing into their own, the future (as becoming) is also part of the adolescent structural identity. They are required to hail this futurity, because the future of the social organization itself rests upon their productive incorporation. This element of futurity is connected to the new psycho-social incorporation under advanced capitalism. There is much more to say about the subject-condition of the metropole’s adolescents. In the social historical context of the adolescent, if adolescents are in fact sold back commodified fractals of their own imaginations, then it is not unwarranted to worry that the substance of their subjectivity, which is defined by years of dramatic growth and socialization, is also caught up in the circuits of surplus-extraction and regulation by psycho-technological means. But, because the reign of ex-

150

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

151

traction to which the metropolitan adolescents are subjected to stands outside of the formal political economy, because adolescents do not fit the mold of the acknowledged labor practices, critical theory has been slow coming to realize the changing nature of exploitation developing on the home fronts of global capital. Adolescent development and socialization happen in historical, political contexts. This has been usually theorized broadly as ever-changing, but always a version of industrial, socially-productive historical processes ‘cooperating’ with personal interests. It implies a timeless, arguably depoliticizing spectrum of historicity marked by exploitation and support. The case of psycho-historically-located youth demands a more explicit conception of the historical form of these processes of cooperation, because the terms of the relations between a person and a social system are not only interested or historically determined, but, in our specific context, political and profit-(accumulation and domination)-driven. Valorization as the Site of Exploitation Theories of ideational, emotional, and relational investment align with those of immaterial labor theories in that they capture the qualitative basis of value-adding in embodied dimensions of thought (representation), feeling (affect), and social-relations (intersubjectivity). The dimensions also speak to an ephemeral psychic process of valorization. Labor has primarily been the container for the psychological process of valorization—which is the ability to grow investment into an object or relationality through repetition, conscious expenditure of intentionality. We can uncover the basic definition of valorization in the sense that human beings engage in the process of investing themselves (that is, they add value) into the objects of their concrete reality (which is always me-

diated through mental projections, impressions, and psycho-physiological stimulation). This activity of valorizing is emotional, ideational, and practical. Valorization’s libidinal register lies in its everyday deployment. Repetition and disciplining bring about practices of discharging the frustration of intentional affective investment that doubles to make labor tolerable, if not pleasurable. There is a loss of self in the unavoidable repetition of work, and ideology fills that vacuum of consciousness. This process also employs directing of desire towards non-presence (alleviation of presence, immediate conscious attentiveness). In other words, valorization consists of a combination of active, bodily engagement as well as a psychic self-withholding. In fact it could be argued that non-presence is the libidinal benefactor of laboring—that is, the qualitative reason why an activity is valorizing, or significant on its own. In consumer society the institutions of socialization (TV, social media, and video games) each take a piece of the valorizing process. Television (or its replacement, Netflix and other video-streaming services) takes care of identification; social media takes care of tweaking the performativity; gaming incorporates investment, valorizing and laboring. In this way, a consumer subject attains a consumer libidinal economy. We will soon talk about what is being signaled by the slow but steady consolidation between the various streams of commercial televisual identification as representing the dawn of the auto-stimulating machine. In the way the story goes, I have sought the conceptual means for concrete political application of a synthesized theory of psychic value that can shed light on what is going on in the incorporation of the adolescent libidinal economy in the consumer economy. In my preliminary reading, the concept of psychic value goes through a number of developments in the course

152

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

153

of the 20th century—from stimulus/reflex parallel of libido-cathexis, to desire as a mobilizing lack, to object-relations, to primary-identification and the unconscious as its imprint, to the desiring-machine. For this reason I find it necessary to consider where the political economy meets the historical experience of subjectivity—the terms of subjective valorization. The rationale for the present choice of political economic language lies in commodification, which is advanced capitalism’s equivalent of commodity fetishism in Marx (the kernel of reification, alienation, and thus consciousness), and the critique of historical society and regulation for the purpose of building expectation and excitation for commodification. Labor, then, represents the economization of life-activity. In other words, in order to become historically-applicable, a theory of psychic value needs a theory of psychic labor—an immaterial corollary to labor as an economized, extractive activity. Psychic labor is a stand-in for what results in the following sequence. Initially role-play becomes convincingly subjectively valuable, because each person independently and libidinally valorizes the experience through narrativizing, recognizing, objectifying, and identifying. Play, as a prefigured event, is also socially-manipulatable, and in consumer society, it is highly profitable for being so. Everyone wants to play to alleviate the maladies of excessive, needless, unwarranted repression of the instincts deemed unproductive in that which still passes for normality. Technology enables attention-direction via the televisual gadgetry. And gaming captures play by using the identificatory psycho-technology to secure its link to the affects that satisfy the person by pumping up the subjective. In the end, the person works to sustain the link of valorization in gaming.

Looking at this amassing circuitry of psychic and concrete worlds, holding onto the lenses of psycho-technology deepens the analysis as it suggests the nature of the underlying psychic surplus. Identification is an activity of self-projection, which carries on an activity very much paralleling the kind of valorizing that becomes labor. In the context of the historical subject, this psychic activity is the repetition of the act that had led to the satisfying valorization in the historical moment. What seems to be happening in gaming is that the pleasure of play is replaced by the satisfaction of identification, which is a repetition of an earlier valorization, and as such, is inevitably repressive—or should we say, dependent on a former experience for motivating, reproductive surplus. The identification, the psychic relationality between the person and himself stimulates him physically, which the game guidedly helps him misinterpret as satisfaction by seeing the activity through the perspective of a forced avatar-subjectivity. We will return to this point on psychic surplus in chapter five. Taking up the discourse of addiction to stimulating mediation within the context of the metropolitan politico-libidinal economy presents an extractive machine as an unchallenged force of an endless repetition of limited, stock conclusions. Yes, habituation of gameimmersion takes time away from the social. And, yes, this has wide-ranging, reasonable consequences when it comes to physiological, psychological, and social health concerns for upholding normality. But, what is still missing is a wider political recognition, something akin to considering that what is engendered as addiction is a process of libidinal integration by means of aesthetic lure to identify with a process that perpetually habituates—a process of relation that increasingly compliments the process otherwise relegated for socialization. Simply put, what is happening should not be

154

Chapter Four

The Loot Loop

155

dismissed as the consequence of immature subjects’ faulty decision-making. In other words, a deeper understanding of what goes on in consumer socialization is forgone under the pretense of protecting a romantic fantasy of social ecology. After all, if we just recall the beginnings of the cultural studies movement in Britain, we will remember that they widely documented the extent to which the popular preoccupation with the right ways of socializing youth was mainly a cover to subjugate and delegitimize the working class youth, who were deemed as the political enemy of the public. Commodification appropriates the means of socialization without resistance, because socialization already justifies its subjugation of the human by claiming authorship of the process of becoming a person—here becoming a subject, a person who speaks for himself. The power of commodification stems from capitalist colonization of socialization’s processes. It characterizes how the human (always wrapped in its potential sociality) is objectified, and becomes regulated capitalist operationalization. By default, commodification seeks to steal, replace, and then guide subjective choice-making towards motivating production and creating circuits of demand-production by augmenting desire. In this sense, its objective compliments that of the traditional authorities of reproduction—the colonization of surplus-value control, which goes a long way in explaining why these processes have been largely undetected. Popular technology enables the economic exploitation of subjects and sociality, making self-conception dependent on the forms of psycho-social technologies of reproduction. What distinguishes digital technology apart from its psycho-social compatriots is that it expands mediative capture by a converging televisual experience. It enables interactivity with this televisual representa-

tion. In particular, it captures the socializing process of play and imagination as a psycho-social, relational interaction. In exploring this difference we also have to contend with the added dimension of this being a commodity-mediation, keeping in mind the problem of profit-fixation of the capitalist political economy. But, then again, this is an old story. This consolidation within the industrial capitalist mode of production already happened long ago at the dawn of the consumer society. Perhaps, the point we can still hold onto is this: being born out of the idealistic projection of imperialism, guarding industrial capitalism from within its most lucrative base of the military industrial complex, today's technology is far from being neutral. In its current role, the technology is propelled by the needs of capitalism to counter the falling rate of profit under the guise of marginalism. As such the exploitation taking place is much deeper than the wallets of the parents…

156

The Loot Loop

The Loot Loop

157

Chapter Five From reified to commodified performance of self

The dawn of consumer technology, particularly the effect of televisuality and mass production on aesthetics and psychology, signals capitalist incursion on the subject-formative basis of subject-object mediation. But, contemporary studies of televisual mediation seem to have made a calculated move away from attending to this problematic. And when the same literature finds space to consider the affective states of consumer televisual experience (that is, immersion and addiction), it singles out the adolescents as the sole subject of social concern. But why? If the same technology affects adults, adolescents, and children, and only in the case of the adolescents have we supposedly a sense of the darker side of the impact of such technological mediation, then does it not follow that the coercive potential applies beyond generationality? In the 1990s and early 2000s, popular culture superficially reflected on the possibility (at least subconsciously) that subject-constituting psycho-technology is commodified by claiming that consumer industries were engaging in purposeful infantilization of adult subjectivity. Initially the introjection suffered from its own ideological presumption about adulthood, liberal individualism, and maturity. But, an unfortunate consequence of this attempt at analysis was that it

led to dismissal of such provocations. It was found to be too insulting to presumably autonomous and selfaware adult persons, when in reality, it was really just too obvious to bypass the defenses of the (adolescent) narcissistic self-conception of well-refined consumer subjects. Since the so-called adults are also exploited and unconsciously manipulated to align their consumption patterns with the guidelines of the reigning consumer capital monopolies, they are already being unconsciously habituated to identify as minoritized avatar-subjects to the extent of their internalization of commodified relationalities. After all, the second life has become culturally valued because it purports to offer a life without realworld strictures and costs. Ideally mediative technology could allow persons to control their own flow of affectation by being the ones determining the sources. This would be my utopian fantasy for mediative technology (I will touch upon this subject in the last chapter). But, such a subjectivity requires education in self-conception. In the historical present, it is not the case that technology promotes self-determination. In fact the young person is trained for the political economy despite his own subjecthood. As capitalism continues to transform social relations, the metropole is bound to become a place where the everyday structures of relationality micromanage the life of consciousness as appropriate exclusively only within the domain of economically valuable activity. Gaming helps capitalism resolve its problem of class consciousness: the middle class as tasked primarily with reproducing consumption does not need a consciousness of itself, and the various subsets of the working classes do much better when they continue being working class but believe themselves as aspiring middle class subjects through their televisual, mediated diets. The larger economic apparatuses supply directives for

160

The Loot Loop

1. Picchi (2016).

its individuated drive. Thus, through the looking glass of the digital interface, simulation and avatar-subjectivity, the false-consciousness cultivated through economic and social relations doubles as means to satisfy the subjugated masses by way of technological mediation of their very own object relations. The Self-conception of A Gamer As An Adolescent White Man The relation between the adolescent subject and video games comes down to the psycho-politics of labor, the regime of work dictating the how much work is acceptable for an amount of stimulation. Here is a paragraph from a mainstream news article to take us there: Young men without college degrees—a group that has been largely left out of the economic recovery—aren’t going back to school or trying to switch occupations, according to University of Chicago economist Erik Hurst. Instead, they appear to be spending their time playing video games. “The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of 12 and sometimes upwards of 30 hours per week,” Hurst said in an interview with the university. “This change marks a relatively major shift that makes me question its effect on their attachment to the labor market.” Video gaming is clearly grabbing the attention of young men who aren’t looking for work, Krueger noted. Men between 21 and 30 years old who aren’t on the hunt for a job almost doubled their weekly video game hours since 2004, while their TV viewing declined.1 The discussion about the adolescent subjects’ gaming should really be focused around the plight of the overvalorized and unemployed, who show their libidinal

Chapter Five

161

aspirations through the fantasy they project to gaming. Gaming has become more popular as a means for young people to get through the day the more that video games have embraced and reproduced a valuable sense of laboring and engagement practices in the everyday. Playing loot games while unemployed is something to do, as an anesthetic while awaiting the economic engagement that might never come. The fantasy of the redo, recognition for learning, meaningful compensation for the psychic toll of labor, this fantasy is so prevalently shared precisely because of its positionality. The adolescent subject is repurposed by gaming to perform two tasks which deeply contradict one another—to enable the players to see themselves as self-actualizing, self-conscious, autonomous agents of self-satisfaction at the same time that the subject must also motivate them to direct all their libidinal flows towards recommitment to the stability and permanence of the consumer society. We all know that the fantasy of the self-actualizer is short sighted—brilliant stars burn out becoming black holes. The same way the lifespan of a life lived on the periphery, an adventurous kind of life, would be too unpredictable to guarantee there will be fulfillment at all. This is something that games provide, here in the in-game you are free to chase that fantasy of the libidinally driven investment and sense of meaning. *** Zimbardo, the psychologist best known for the Stanford Prison experiment, has since migrated to focus on the question of socially and culturally appropriate male identity. I would like to spend a moment to talk about his take on the subject matter, because his approach and dictum represent a much larger trend in the kind of theoretical reductionism that takes place

162

The Loot Loop

2. Zimbardo (2011), p. xxii. 3. Ibid p. 20.

in the process of explaining a phenomenon that we would like to avoid. (Zimbardo is also a figure visible to the researchers raised on the Internet—for one, he has given a TED talk.) In the way he explains it, Zimbardo locates the predicament of modern males as stuck between “social intensity syndrome” and “arousal addictions.” He diagnoses young men as suffering from what he describes as evolutionary preference for male company and arousal addictions. Arousal addictions signal a new kind of arousal for Zimbardo. For him men’s brains are being rewired for novelty, excitement and “regular experience of stimulus,” where “the key is the novelty of visual experience.”2 As a result, he is convinced that the nexus of the problem is in the fact that young men are totally out of sync with traditional classes and romantic relationships. Zimbardo presumes that social reproduction is meant to set the standards. The world of the genders, roles, and types would emerge from such a binary operation. He confidently offers a diagnosis for the millennial males: Because of the new difficulties facing young men in this changing, uncertain world, many are choosing to isolate themselves in a more rewarding place, a place where they have control over outcomes, where there is no fear of rejection and they are praised for their abilities…While removing oneself from the demands of society may be a conscious decision for adult men…it is often an unconscious decision for young men, who find safety and sovereignty in video games and porn. They become increasingly adept and skilled at gaming, refining their skills, allowing them to achieve high status and respect within the game.3

Chapter Five

163

Zimbardo never questions his operative lenses. As a behavioral psychologist trained at Yale in the 1950s, it is not in his methodology to consider race and class, let alone intersectionality. Instead, in a telling move that mirrors the popular approach to thinking about the maladies of youth under consumer society, Zimbardo focuses on how the youth are fairing against traditional psycho-social structures and demands:

What Zimbardo identifies is not a pathology, but in fact a symptomatology of the changing political econo-

mic role for the vast majority of metropolitan youth who self-identify as men. This last bit of phrasing is crucial. Gender is a performance of a constellation of confirming, reassuring, identifying, but also subjugating and standardizing symbols and relations that shapes the relation between the subject and his sense of self. Gender becomes a kind of relational filter that organizes and disciplines some basic interactions. Without a critique of social reproduction, my sense is that we can easily miss the critical context: the dawn of the self-stimulating apparatus has taken its place in the existing political economy. These young people seek mediated televisual experiences that will supply them with the content to reaffirm their self-conception—as a commodified process, the relationality must be lived unconsciously. The internalization of a drive for novelty, excitement, and arousal takes place in the specific social and economic context in the lives of these young people. Locally it is during their “off hours” when they are not structurally plugged in, when they are supposed to be engaging in the recuperation of their productive forces. As such, there is a therapeutic, supplementary nature to their media consumption. The arousal these young men seek has an ideological valiance that has to be explicitly investigated to make sense of what might be going on in their situated libidinal economies. Otherwise, the young men Zimbardo diagnoses with arousal addictions are being punished for what the consumer society has made of them. Since birth, they have lived the slow and unconscious entanglement of the libidinal life with a diet of consumer affects that periodically bloomed into various versions of libidinal economization through regulation in the name of exploitation. Somehow on the most holy libidinal level these subjects have been conditioned to seek fulfillment, recognition, interaction, and identification from objects that can only be seen and heard, and

164

Chapter Five

Most people will agree that there’s something missing in young men’s worlds, and just by sheer numbers it is clear there are many activities young men are not pursuing and skills they are not developing in lieu of living their lives in virtual reality. When a person spends the vast majority of their time on any one thing they run the risk of becoming one-dimensional. Perhaps the young men whose parents are willing to support their son’s addictive screen habits will end up like Japan’s “herbivorous” hikikomori males, who isolate themselves from the world and life’s pleasures, but for the less financially insulated we may see fewer degrees, and a rise in fatherlessness and unemployment not unlike the gender imbalances minority and poorer communities have experienced for the last few decades. Additionally, the trajectory of low-income males will worsen if they are unable to find work. Their chances of ending up in trouble with the law may increase, as will the likelihood of their female counterparts ending up as single mothers in poverty. We must provide real hope and inspiration for young men by creating new social expectations that are more productive for men and for society. We don’t need to chuck the old system entirely…4

The Loot Loop

4. Zimbardo pp 9-10 (my emphasis).

165

related to only through memory and fantasy—perhaps in the same way as their realization of subjective and political economic mobility and empowerment. What is to follow is a discussion on the notion of gender, race, and class intersections as they appear in the context of loot-gaming entertainment as a semblance of the auto-stimulating apparatus. Between the individual and the society at large, between the libidinal economy of the individualized and the political economy of the collective, a person’s tie to the larger whole is governed behaviorally and materially. His predicament is also regulated by overlapping systems of ideology and habituation that we have referred to as overlapping systems of oppression, or the involvement of race, class, and gender structurations in determining the quality of one’s nature of the selfconsciousness, perception of the world, and prioritization in ideology and real life, etc. Meanwhile it should be pointed out that gender has been a rather overdetermined and one-dimensional topic in video game studies. When it does surface, the subject matter is mostly limited to liberal issues of representation. There is a dimension of gender performance to the complex that is metropolitan adolescence, millennial gaming that goes beyond the conventional concerns on the topic. The point thus far has been to follow the entanglement of libidinal, attentional, and psycho/social economies, which we will now extend to structural (psycho-physiological) embodiment and gender performativity. The focus of this chapter will be on the intertwining of bodies and commodities within a framework that also recognizes the construction of gender and in particular its intertwining with whiteness. In this way we can explore another three/dimensional nexus of concretization at which the political economy is linked to the libidinal economy via the social, object-relational, other-relational interpersonal economy.

The notion of performativity needs to be situated in the context of the intersectional understanding of the production and reproduction of subjectivity under overlapping systems of oppression. The theory argues that seemingly discreet sets of oppression are shaped by one another. Furthermore, the theory of intersectionality that came out of black feminist thought aspires to explain how the interrelation of repressive and oppressive systems create a social hierarchy. Moreover, when applied to the lives of the people aspiring to uphold the status quo, the theory can help us understand how they are subjectively invested in the project. Intersectional theory reminds us that there is no singular experience of identity. Hence, there is no adolescence either. But, triangulated, we get a closer sense of what it might mean to occupy a place on that spectrum of experience. In other words, there is an operative paradox at the center of our structural analysis— what we are about to discuss does not really exist. There is no single hegemonic white middle class masculine identity in singularly locatable real world experience. Instead, what we have once again is a situation of commodified identification. Adolescent self-identified heterosexual males find satisfaction in performing this sort of masculinity—aggressive, cliquish, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, but also patriotic, identificatory, and periodically even spiritually-minded. The gender performance of these adolescents reflects not their own shortcomings but that of institutionalized ways of channeling their frustration and insecurity outwards, beyond themselves, into exteriority. In the metropolitan context, video games welcome adolescent subjectivity—after all, the adolescent is an ideological subject of consumer capitalism. This is the subject hailed through social media paradigms, gamification, video games, and audience-identification. This adolescent is not a young person per se; it is only

166

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

167

the commercially supplied avatar for the ideologically co-opted subject. A commodified unconsciousness evolved from a mass of waste, the avatar regulates the experience of consciousness in the name of entertainment. The state of consciousness can be characterized by limited self-awareness, narcissism, possessiveness, submission to idealized authority, and a latent but unrealizable androgyny. That is, it is a subject with surplus spilling over on all sides of his objects of self-conception. Commercial adolescence is ideological subjectivity in its most politically innocuous form— a historical instance of naturalization of economicallytailored, limited consciousness. To identify as an adolescent, then, is to be a de-historicized subject, overdetermined by periodization and institutionalization. This definition of adolescence borrows from what Kristeva calls “the ideality syndrome”5 — the belief in the reality of an essential metaphysical economy, in which what gratifies the person for undertaking this sort of investment/intentionality/laboring is in his own self-sacrifice to the idea. More importantly, one is hailed as an adolescent affectively. That is, affect, or the materiality of object relations, guarantees the transmission of what is essential for social (ideological) reproduction by grounding the socializable value in the embodied experience. It is crucial to keep in mind that the adolescent is a discursively produced figure, an empirical composite character-type shared across multiple milieus. For the typified adolescent—that home front subject preserved and reproduced as an adolescent—stuck in the institutions of social reproduction in a typical consumer metropole, sociality is highly over-determined, prison-like. He is likely overweight, malnourished, and narcissistically maladjusted. He yearns for meaningful privacy—in domesticity his parents are in control; in school, other adults are in control; at his part-time job,

168

The Loot Loop

5. Kristeva (2007).

his boss; in public, the sanctioned state authorities or anyone above his social standing. He is thirsty for pleasurable social recognition. He has poor self-image, likely the result of the role of popular culture and its misogyny played out in the formative scenes of his self and social exploration. He is perpetually depressed, and commercially-geared to fetishize his own alienation. And in his leftover self-reflexivity he cannot even help himself, because those periods are also inscribed into embodied class, clique or caste positions. He lacks experience of the social real, while his own embodiment and sense of sexuality stem from commercial mediation—pop culture and internet porn. In the same vein he has grown up with television, which teaches him the only interpersonal relational language he knows to deploy to engage with others. Not to mention that he is casually invisible within intergenerational relations as he is marked as being not yet valuable, not yet worthy of rights, still a body of complexes transitioning into a legitimate subjectivity. In any case all the experiences of everyday social alienation prepare the grounds for the adolescent feeling the gadget-mediated on-screen as the proper panacea. The metropolitan adolescent has been raised on neoliberal ideology in which all ends are predetermined—rationality is reduced to choice-making, and education to job training; they might as well forget class mobility as even higher education cannot guarantee that their socioeconomic situation would ever change. They are taught that they have to pay for everything, so all social interactions begin to feel like a form of trade where value and interest dominate. On top of all of this macroeconomic structuring, below the surface, at the center of subjectivity, objects become irrationally valorized, and inversely, the subject is ridden by a sense of lacking, not having been appreciated by the world.

Chapter Five

169

Tied to the televisual, because of its centrality in the consumer governance, the metropolitan adolescents do not know anything besides pornographic object relations brought forth by the contemporaneous insertion of televisual consumption as a mediator between subjects and themselves, and the loose family relations. The liberalization of object relations away from the traditionally symbolic, parental authority during early childhood means that there was an early systematic uncoupling of the primarily social and psychic relation of desire to its objects of fantasy. Persons were enabled to find comfort in objects, exclusive of the presence of another. The centralized media also affects their sense of self. The adolescents exhibit skewed body image. Without the regular input from the outside, the adolescents could not handle the anxiety brought on by the contradictory insides. In any case they would interpret it as boredom, misrecognizing the affect from within merely as a lack of stimulation. Even though they have been socialized to look for user reviews and know the technical languages for expert consumption, they are unable to distinguish between opinion and thought. The game offers a coherent performance of socially valued personae—an opportunity to play the male white middle class adolescents. Otherwise the aspiring young ideologues would have a very ambiguous relation to their own sense of their masculinity as reflected through gender identity and class consciousness. It is reasonable that in his free time, he turns to video games, because this is where he is in control to (at least) work for stimulation. In this caricature we can see how his personal inadequacies (or interpellated feelings thereof) play into motivating him libidinally to immerse himself into the digital mediation. This person might even have a social future in an avatar-medi-

The Attraction of the Open-world Games Modern video games share some important attributes: the apparatus, the mediation, the interactivity and the controller, the game design paradigms, the trends and the technical limits, the creative capacity and maturity of the medium’s producers. These common points are the driving force behind the socialization of their self-identified consumers. The subjects living in that space are dreadfully necessary to the present existence of the political economy. They have games as parts of their lives as a structural consequence and intention. I would like to focus on how open-world games accomplish this feat of incorporating individuated libidinal economies, and how gender performance and identification (performativity, in short) plays into the enjoyment of playing them. Open-world games are much more related to the daily routinized identificatory needs and self-satisfaction habits than most other genres of games. They attempt to reproduce, or at least mirror the complexity of a given political economic situation. As a solitary experience they allow for the recollection, the re-condensation of identificatory concentration. To talk about the contradiction around which these games are built and the ideological purpose that they serve, we need to recall how valorization is mirrored into the basic labor/value equation in open world games, which is also paradigmatically affirmed by the valorization in the larger political economy. In fact, what all the most popular open-world franchises have in common is that they find their niche, and

170

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

ated environment. Gaming also appears as a viable option to his commanding social-handlers; to his parents, it is a promise of a productive future, which is often why gaming is rationalized as harmless fun more safe than the real historical alternatives of playing in the street.

171

offer a consistent, diverse world with caricaturish parallelism to the complexity of the real one. The game world is open to players to roam around. Missions are by and large activated on players’ volition. The game world is populated by systems of artificial intelligence which simulate the idea of real-world complexity and depth. The game world gives players the ability to concoct their own combinations of simulation and stimulation that will satisfy their ideological and physiological needs, which arise in the response to their everyday lives under the regiments of the consumer society —to let them live as if the world has become fully defined beforehand and all that is left to do is choose a path. The business of creating loops of activity for auto-stimulating cocktailing is something new in the world of mediated consumer entertainment, and video games in particular. When a game world is set up in such a way that the gamer subject works to discover a cocktail of interactivity that suits their libidinal and ideological needs, the end result invariably has to be that the gamer subject picks a cocktail according to the needs and desires that arise in the context of their everyday lives outside the game world. In this way, the open-world games, which do this sort of ‘service’ most pronouncedly, in effect become mediators, panacea for the real world eventuality. Life in the Loot Loop Let us turn to Grand Theft Auto V (GTA).6 The way that this game has become a part of the everyday libidinal economies of so many metropolitan youth points to how open-world gaming has become a psycho-technically administered consumer therapy for coping with the overlapping systems of oppression of the everyday life. It is the fifth installment in a series of games that have defined the standard for the expected experience by the prospective players.

The game reproduces a neoliberal vision of a selfcontained landscape, a biome in which the city is the center with some exotic outlays. Everything is permitted to the extent that only nihilistic detachment becomes the modus operandi. Always with the objectives to maim, to destroy, to loot, the player explores the game world—drives its many cars, customizes the avatar, his home, his objects in various ways, finds missions that will enable the player to feel like he is progressing, like he is thriving. If the loot loop fails to stimulate at any point, the player is even invited to discharge some frustration within the game and hire a sex worker, visit a strip club, or engage in unprovoked violent outbursts against NPC bystanders. GTA is primarily an interactive fantasy in which players role-play to reclaim an honorable place in the patriarchy, the labor economy, and sense of self-valorization. In the game, the player plays three different character arcs—two white, and one black. With Michael’s (middle class, white) arc, the player gets the redemption of the patriarch story. Franklin’s (working class, black) arc gives him the fantasy of rags to riches. And Trevor’s (white, forgotten working poor) arc provides him with the historically-specific identification. In this way the game sets up three narrative arcs that satisfy the different ideological personalities foundational to the vision of the fitting consumer subject; partly hailing the traditional values, partly enabling participation in the political economic dynamic, and partly offering experiences of the traversal. The circle is completed by allowing players to also create their own avatar to play in an open-world with others, where they can go on to deploy and perform what they learned over the course of the single-player campaign. In the online version of the game, you can even play yourself: you create a customized avatar that, besides the usual cosmetic combinations, also

172

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

6. Rockstar Games (2013).

173

can interject itself as an heir in the game lore’s genealogy. Giving you a third-person perspective, you can fetishize your body and dive into the meaningless customization and variety afforded by the game. The four characters considered together outline the ideological needs of the self-identified male adolescents. The logic of satisfaction seems to always boil down to the pornographic: the game gets the user to interact with the audiovisual elements to create scenarios of self-stimulation (stress and the alleviation of it), and the user interprets the audiovisual stimulus as signs for particular kinds of self-stimulation. What do the players get out of it? Sense of feeling powerful, sense of agency, sense that the labor they put into the activity matters, of thriving, entertainment and comfortable exploration of the new, of knowing the extent of the world and how it all fits together. In a quick survey of the most commercially successful games of the last few years, between first person, third person, open world, and real time strategy games, there is a consistency among the identificatory models reproduced in games. What was once symbolized by whiteness and nationalism is now represented by quantity, mass, and power. Race is still operative, but in a disembodied form. Even in the 2016 edition of the Civilization games (Sid Meier’s Civilization VI), the center pervades. The deep inculcation of the game’s design logic within the vestiges of real politique, game theory rationality tells us something about the quality of the point of view on sociality and the world—one that is always already paranoid, fixated on one’s own maximization and material possession accumulation, already interested and pursuant of sociality solely by that motivation. To return to GTA one more time, it offers an easily reproducible fantasy of rags to riches, experimentation, taboo breaking, excitement, and reliving the televisual memory. Even after the allure has worn off, the thriving

and the consequential consumption underwrite adherence/worship/compliance to the game loop, and being okay with just getting bodily stimulation brought on by combinatory logic and hand–eye coordination. Open–world games also create an ideological consistency unparalleled in the real world. All of the possible interactions with the world boil down to the same set of controls: interact or activate, drive or fly, traverse or travel, and shoot or craft. In this way, the game creates a sought-after interactive fantasy in which the world makes sense in its entirety, and the abilities you are given activate particular parts of the world—in other words, there is nothing outside of the given which has not been accounted for, or does not fit into game’s core logic of interactivity in some way—thus, satisfaction (as expected beforehand) is guaranteed, because the entire world is built to exercise repressed desire. Everything that the consumer society would like the ambivalent adolescent subjects to believe, the game gives the ability to represent three dimensionally. The gamer must simply heed the call of the machine and submit to following the order of the tasks prefigured by the game. His newly constituted in-game life thus becomes about accumulation of money, guns, cars, homes, and clothes. And it is all the easier because the scenario is couched in a familiar action-film fantasy. The world is at your fingertips; all you have to do is activate the waiting missions or NPC. The game reasserts the ideologically material existence of invisible authority, coherence, and totality. It conditions or perpetuates the commodity-identification on the libidinal level by satisfying the desire of lack, that is, immersion, non-presence, libidinal stimulation into timelessness. Here it only has limited capacity for exploitation; it is good and sounds stable as long as there is something affectively new that can be (re)generated. As the well of ideological objects is recyclable, the

174

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

175

consumer subject inverted as a gamer becomes immersively incapable (more so, uninterested) in political self-awareness. This is because a libidinal economy of repetition of auto-stimulation immersed in commodity fetishism can only result in a pornographic relation to objects and experience. The site of reproduction is in the relationality between the avatar and the person at the very site of the constitution of the subject; the commodity is the object in this relationship, so only the subject can produce, by laboring, the origins of what becomes a commodity affect—this is the auto of auto-stimulation. In this sense, emotionality has a materiality, in which extensive suspension of self-consciousness leads to sensually pleasurable subjugation. In gaming, through personalized identifying with an avatar and its accompanying audiovisual presentation, a gamer accepts to work in order to get the feeling (that of a desired object) through the satisfaction of watching, hearing, and interactivity. In this mediation, in this watching, there is a materiality to this gaming-consumer political economy, and it is tied up with affect, as it is the feel of labor that valorizes the repetitive task. In other words, if the libidinal economy is formed by how a subject comes to relate to his own conception of labor, valorization, habituation, and satisfaction, then there must be a correspondence between the libidinal and the political economic. The mode of production plays a determining role in superstructural ordering, which takes form as ideology—that is, it is ideology that serves as the tie between the subjective and the structural. In this sense considering gaming within consumer capitalism allows us to ponder the political question of how a person can become convinced to treat his life as if it were one of many. It is only in this way that one can submit to repressively desublimated periodization of experience, to the regulation of his libidinal economy.

Gender as Psycho-technology It starts with the body; the dimension of embodiment is central to understanding how video games have come to offer a means for ideological satisfaction despite and in reaction to the repression endured because of the political economy and its psycho-social conditions. What we have to do is situate where the game experience touches that of the psychic experience. In terms of gender performativity’s entanglement in the relation, the critical pivot seems to happen around the presumption of a body. The process taken as satisfactory by the subject hinges on the internalized with the avatar, what is seen and what is imagined and projected. On the same point, it also hinges on the habitual currents of the subject’s libidinal economy, and the relational ways that the subject has come to relate to the world and draw meaning from interacting with objects within it. After all, identificatory habitual practices are reactions to intersecting and overlapping inconsistencies, contradictions, and outright let-downs of hegemony and dominant ideological narratives and rationalizations. Where race, class and gender insect and overlap, gaming offers its version of the calming substance. For instance, the ideological tropes employed by the makers of the Gears of War franchise—all the father-son loyalty, comradeship, heroism business—exemplifies how seamlessly ideological systems of hierarchization work themselves into the games meant to offer people an experience of fantasy. Even if we presume that the ideological focus on the values is chosen for no other reason than its presumed marketability, the point should not be lost that the cultural producers by necessity have to rely on the already existing, the historically valorized popular cultural archive to create the game scenarios. So, values end up reinforced by fragments of patriarchal, racist, moralist, nationalist ideological narratives.

176

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

177

In a manner, the body becomes an affected terrain of symbolic communication of the system of socialization and subjectification. The body as a private place is in fact laden with social meaning. Historical power structures working in and through bodies legitimate and authorize persons as public (and private) subjects. More importantly, the body becomes a territory on which affect defines the quality of the experience—a conduit of social and economic intent subjectively experienced as stimulation, excitement, arousal, and the like. Gender as psycho-technology becomes clearer as an idea when we consider how ideology is a kind of psycho-technology. Ideology enables access to the current pertinent object relations of a person. Through identification, ideology calls on the person to reread himself according to some high ideals, and then accept himself now having reconfirmed that he had internalized the particular ideological truth. Gender is about histories of upbringing, sets and configurations of habituated preference, a learned and familiarized performativity, which is expected and valorized in social interactions. It serves as the default script for when the interactions get personal, or begin to disstimulate too early.7 In gaming the threat of dissimulation is kept at bay by getting gamers to assign the habitual treatment function to their entertainment mediation. First they have to learn to stimulate themselves via the screen, using a gamepad and an avatar. Then they self-motivate into a habit of viewing gaming as a means to treat their internal comparison, uncomfortable materialism and its comparative logic, acting out on the spectrum of fantasies constructed from bits of valorized televisual experience, frustration with the social or the political economic. This relationality is grounded in the political economy and historical materiality that pervades the present in which it has arisen. Our relation to games is located in the everyday lives of being consumer subjects,

178

The Loot Loop

7. In Butler’s terms, gender is about performativity, which means that it is tied to a whole series of experiences which were formative in a child’s understanding about the existing economy it was born into. Beside Psychic Life of Power there is also an illuminating passage in Butler’s Gender Trouble on the workings of primary identification (p. 62 and 118-9).

who are regularly injected with desires and perspectives that need recognition and operationalization if they are to continue to function as they do. Avatar-subject identification works through normalized symbols of intersectional location riding on a feeling of relating to the world as a white middle class male. The game allows the player to reproduce feelings in themselves, affects of power and mastery belonging to the ideologically anointed subjectivity. The game functions to provide the gamers with models of ideologically suitable characters through which to relate to themselves and satisfy some of the psycho-social fantasies they have been harboring. Gender performativity is utilized as a tableau, a conduit surface for the occasion. A Routine Fantasy of Exploitation In the most popular games the user role-plays being the ideologically constructed white, masculine, self-righteous, singular center. This is a psycho-social bond of power in the most subtle and obvious ways—through the body, the body of the gamer that self-stimulates and the body of the avatar that houses the gamer's spirit. Occupying another’s (avatar’s imagined) body, the gamer is enabled to role-play that agency through the eyes of that constructed and performed subjectivity. But as a subject of the real world, that gamer also gets to practice his oppositional consciousness in a regulated, encapsulated in-game world. This is why Minecraft works so well— it enables players to recreate the world of their fantasies, the one they remember. In an open world or a MMO game, if it were not for obvious identifiers like a different colored name tag, one could not tell the difference between a NPC (a non-player-character) and a human player. All of the game models stem from a central audiovisual system, and thus share a common denominator. In this world, the gamer is modelled after the NPC. The NPC, while

Chapter Five

179

having a scripted, limited artificial intelligence, embodies the extent and limitations of the physical (coded) ideology at play. Similarly, the NPCs are the only people you will know, so their level of intelligence and affectivity sets the standard for interaction with other humans in the game world. When a player begins an open world game, even if they work hard to recreate the resemblance of the in-game avatar prefixed to themselves, they are still entering a world on some other terms; they are entering an ideological order. The ethics of NPC relationality dialectically relates to the already existing general templates of social relations and their many extremes. It is only with such seriousness that the gamers are enabled to live out their political economic fantasy of will to power through their relationship with the NPCs. This “will” has a racial, classist, hyper-rationalist, aggressive, heartlessly tactical, exploitative, capitalist, materialist, sexist, objectifying make-up. And while playing the game, the player will most often encounter and interact with NPCs. The notion of gender is most directly communicated in this reflexive relationship to NPCs. Among the ways in which one can generally interact with NPCs in modern video games, shooting and demanding service come to mind. Even if not directly gendered, these activities become associated, especially when there is a gendered image prevalent among video games. The NPCs become the underclass. They are the bread and butter of the open world. We exploit them. We use them. We farm them. In some open world games, they are even assignable and able to be put to work. In the inverted mirror image of the gamer subject himself, the fantasy of political economic empowerment is realized when one can farm this underclass, actually participate in the necessary stripping of the underclass of their belongings for one's own accumulation.

The Selective Operationalization of Gender Performativity in Loot Games With the growth of the consumer society, traditional gender identificatory regimes began to waver, because while the patriarchy continued to reign strong, their relational processes faltered, or did not add to the feedback like normal. The problem arose when consumer capitalism began to compete with traditional reproductive processes by interjecting its own visions of the conventionally ideal. At the end of this dialectical process, we find ourselves in the company of images of hyper-masculinity pervasive in specific sites of the consumer mediative apparatus that harken back to WWII propaganda imagery—young men regularly read themselves according to the pervading avatar types in games. In line with its historical structuration, there are two phases to successful alignment of a person’s libidinal economy with the interpersonal, political economy. First, the person is trained to submit to subjection according to their genealogical, generational ‘caste’ status—as adolescents, as consumers. This ritual of identification grounds the immediate temporal experience of self-consciousness in relation to adolescence as a culturally affirmed subject position. Second, the adolescent subject subconsciously bonds himself in relation to whatever the emotional, ideal notion of power in his psycho-social historical development. Here is the territory where being white, middle class, male is a sought after, desired subject position. It is a simulated, repeatable experience of identification with power—the fantasy of whiteness colors the world, being middle-class offers a stability and perpetuity of conditions, and masculinity carries the symbols of strength, assertiveness, righteous claim to occupying space and demanding recognition and satisfaction.

180

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

181

Viewing identity as a sense of place of countering the weight of the hegemony explains the attraction to hybridity in identity politics that has pervaded the last two decades in cultural studies. Selective, commodified identification allows one to feel special, in-between, while also feeding off the supplant confirmation coming from the traditional iconography. In the course of development, gender performativity is a reaction to the initial, formative experience of inescapable political and social authority, the subject finds solace and accepts the identification that he must to be recognized as a legitimate subject under the reign of social reproduction. Gaming habits are a reaction to the terms of the libidinal economy, so in a sense they are a reaction to economized gender performativity as well. Where it is inflexible, gaming supplants it by enabling anyone to access the empowering identification without having to confront their subject position at large. Gender performativity in video games rests on the stability of the regulated image, meted out to everyone evenly—an image of believable agency, acquired upon acceptance to submit to the regiment of guided identification. This process hinging on the avatar-subject exists in the context of a real world. Where social and economic reproduction must still occur, therefore their respective libidinal economies must be operative. But the impetus to consume being required by more than just the middle class requires that promotional identification needs to be made more available for the occasion. The way that the question of gender is respected by the gaming conventions also represents the prospects, role, and interests of the medium’s dominant powers. In this sense, the gaming industry has been very responsive to its consumer base: the better-off dictate the kinds of affective stimulus that will be desired in games. Because they will be buying the games, they want the feelings that reaffirm the grounds they stand on and

keep them going. So, they want games that stimulate cognition, awe, exploration, and achievement through destruction, conquering, competition. The poor, because they cannot afford the games, turn to the free-toplay. In doing so, they supply the input of data into big data collections, which are mined for the best reward loops, analysis of the free gameplay for how to optimize it for potential capitalization. If they are not willing to pay for the game directly, the libidinal economy of the gambler would likely hail them in. Class works like time travel from the trend-setters’ center out to the periphery of the consumer society. The poor do not play the same games as the rich. The rich, the ones who can afford the games and the systems, the newest stuff, they are the test cases as much as the poor are. The poor are tested for whether the game loops work, and the rich are tested for how well the stimulant systems work. What gaming adds to the traditional modes of incorporation is hidden in interactivity. Gaming allows satisfaction in ideologically satisfying categories by allowing a gamer to role-play his most desired fantasies of subject-position. Gaming also happens largely in the hours after traditional work, meaning that its psycho-political service takes place during entertainment and recuperation hours. The role of gender performativity within modern games is to circumvent class and race consciousness. In gender performance the primary identification serves to discipline the performance of acting on desire. This whole thing of the girl, and the chase, and that being the heroic journey, they are all normalized, smuggled tropes of social reproduction, the acceptable container symbols for sanctioned discharge. Using them as affective conduits, a player can find satisfaction in achieving the socially constructed and defined values of ideational valorization. This second-order identification meets at the intersection of race, class, and gender:

182

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

183

the avatar, his body, his class mobility, and his social status (praise and/or notoriety). The shape and color of his body enables one level of role-play. His gender, and the perceived suitability of the gender for how he wants to project himself in the game enables another. When it comes to the models given preference in gaming, the predominant image still harkens back to the white and broad-shouldered, reeking of the chauvinist portrayal of masculinity in war propaganda posters. Other important symbols also include the desire for the experience of increasing in mastery and taking over and dominating. The fantasy of the experience of thriving doubles as a fantasy that soothes the internalized aspiration to accumulate wealth. The play must always do so in the game; as he accumulates more, his status increases because the only thing that matters is his utility to the others’ on their quest to the same end of self-perfect ability. The embodiment acts to localize ideological desyncs which would have caused alienation or radicalization away from the status quo. The act of avatarization undercuts any possibility of oppositional consciousness because it usurps the excess consciousness through the physio-psychological motivation that brought the gamer habitually to the game in the first place— when in doubt, play for a while. Usurpation of the instinct that would have led to revolt by enabled subjects to project themselves into another life to satisfy those ideological needs means that the gamers are being groomed to aspire to ideological ideals that they cannot attain any other way than virtually—because consumer society normalizes commodity-mediated (psycho-)social relations where one body is interchangeably valuable as the one next to it. And they are being motivated to do so not for the traditional sake of promoting investment into hierarchies,

Gender as a Domain in the Auto-Stimulating Machine When consumer capitalism defines the modes of subjectivity and the objectives of socialization, gaming becomes the vehicle to regulate consciousness. It is deployed according to different class and caste ideologies, because the differentiation is based on the range of needs from identification. This is why the gamer needs to be theorized as a member belonging to a very specific group that has identified with mediated (repressive) identification. And, it is the system of stimulus-delivery through which each member of a milieu and class begets his own personalized version of the general consumer affect. As a mass-produced consumer object, the affect is structurally identical so as to prolong and desensitize, to naturalize by composition. In the end we have a subject that accepts the very peculiar terms of commodified emotional engagement. He desires tuning out, logging off from his own life while still being affectively present to recognize his own stimulation as pleasurable or at least entertaining. Economic value on this level is grounded in something very basic: self-determination or the lack thereof. On the spectrum of the everyday experiences marked by the family triangle on the one side and the world of work on the other, we can easily observe how this regime appears. Within the confines of the middle class family, children are self-stimulated (and perhaps making a costly baby-sitter unnecessary), all the while auto-stimulating adults are left to their own needs for after-work desublimation as they routinely feel the need of a resonance of their time and sociality lost to labor. The regime also appears in the life of the day-trader, who comes home wired from his regiment of cogni-

184

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

rackets, and power, but to buy into consumption, their own subjugation to the centralized processes.

185

tive labor and its commodified attention on Wall Street. He games to deal with his own alienation—to alleviate his perception of his mental activity as laboring, and instead reinscribe it as a vehicle for leisuring. This is his ultimate expression of hedonism coupled with its own cocktail of psychotropic chemicals in a world in which the libidinal life of the subject has become more and more relegated to the same medium of ideological and semiotic appeasement. The same object relation applies to the case of the unemployed reserve of (adolescent) laborers, who must stand by, and whose only consoling thought as to future employment possibilities lie within a gamified ethic. In each case, the subject’s desire for immediacy and re-inscription overrides the impetus for politicizing subjectification that could spell the end of the exploitative cycle of dependence. The metropolitan adolescents choose to play games to escape, get out of, distract themselves from the reality of their everyday lives. The "from" part matters— there are oppressive conditions that dominate the lives of young people, who must escape their imposed identity through mediation. To put it briefly, they are born to a consumer society in which there is more accounting for surplus before it is even extracted; where machination and automation continually shrink any prospect of permanent well-compensated employment and thus stability; where young people’s notion of gratification and labor-valorization has been intensely tied to a notion of secondary narcissism; where self-consciousness is managed biopolitically through culture and habituation of bodies through the living in economy; where one is denied the alienation from his own exploitation by being ideologically redirected to seek out objectification to calm the stress it causes; where institutions having become more exploitative, have led to institutional language acting as usurping double talk; where mid-

dle class white male is portrayed as the central ideal and presumed to be stable identity even though it is not; lastly, where growing up with pornography, one learns to relate to one’s own body through mediation both technical and ideational. What is there for the metropolitan adolescent to expect from the world in the 21st century? Unlike any generation before them, they have been born to the most systemically managed consumer society in the history of the world. More disturbing is the fact that they are also tasked with the purpose to keep the gears of consumption well oiled. On their own volition, they are socialized to manage themselves through constant interaction with the provisions of the consumer society. The privatization of the means of reproducing subject-constitutive relationalities has enabled the deployment of ideology as a means of prolonging the life of these political economically necessary subjects. Gaming functions on this level of institutionalization. The struggle that people anecdotally report when it comes to coping with the different values of gaming and real life is a testament to this proposition. Their struggle is reasonable; gaming offers an affective and deeply involving institutionalization, while the social can only offer a mixed bag of affects that necessitates intentional and prolonged bouts of self-conceptions. Affectively, gaming uses psycho-technology as means to create auto-stimulation to shape and operationalize its necessary subjects. As such, gaming enables the experience of limited, reified identificatory loops as a person attains the capacity to have a say in the construction of his exploitative subjection. Because it works so well, and because its goal of profit extraction is too sacred to be left to subjects’ own discretion, gaming provides consumer capitalism’s institutionalized idea of subjectivity. The processes are subliminal, microscopic fragments of psycho-social re-

186

Chapter Five

The Loot Loop

187

lations. They fully bypass the person, focusing on training for economic reproduction despite their presence. Viewed in this way, gaming is an alternative to existential, psycho-political therapy where the goal of social cohesion is the same but the means (and the effects on the person under subjection) are different—in any case the subject is left out of the process. In turn, the structures provide agency without a real consequence; they provide the illusion of freedom, and simulate subjectively meaningful stimulation (that is, auto-stimulation). They provide a subjectivity within an unsurmountable totality in the overdetermined social world, in which a perpetual anti-presence becomes desirable, and where rationality exists to perpetuate the avoidance of presence. In this sense, gaming appears to be the realization of the Hayekian fantasy—the realization of an autonomous regulative system based on competition and performance maximization—to which one still must voluntarily find his own way. Just like its historical ideological dictum, the fantasy only applies to the managerial and the propertied classes in the global political economy, which makes for some interesting suggestions: the ideology of perfect competition is meant to discipline the middle class to preserve their political economic positions in the general exploitative processe s of the capitalist economy. And, the autonomy it effectuates is only ideological to the extent that the system is purposed by the demands of the reigning economy. Thus, a loot game commodifies a fantasy of class mobility, sold to those deemed consumers, the ones born to service the circulation of signs, value, and meaning in consumer society.

188

The Loot Loop

The Loot Loop

189

Chapter Six The psycho-political construct

In this final chapter, I want to return to the meta-theoretical themes dominating the overall discussion. This book has centered on the troubling collusion between the Western social reproductive and productive economies with seeming disregard for its youngest members. The general psycho-social framework of this study was meant to attend to this problem. By addressing psycho-social issues within the context of consumer capitalism, a synthesis of the offerings of psychoanalytic and critical theory enables us to pick up on the way in which historical traumas and cultural relational shifts affect the everyday psycho-social state of the adolescent. We have to keep in mind that these relations are theoretical abstractions of particular historical materiality, which, as a structure and a system, is multi-tiered, hierarchized according to race, class, family, age, gender, sensitivity to affect, willingness to participate in domination and submission, aesthetic choices, etc.—in other words, the ways in which intergenerational relations lead to unconscious amalgamation (or the constitution of the “body without organs” as Deleuze and Guattari would have it). Those historical residues of transgression and object-relations in turn always leave their mark on the people who fail to resolve the push for reflection and meaning-making in history.

It is not my intention to limit the possibilities of empowerment in and working through transgenerational issues. I would like to motivate us to think about the openings that go beyond the ideological limitations of imagination to uncover radical empowerment that comes out of a critical study of socialization and culture, its institutional relation to metropolitan adolescent subject position, and the terms of the transgenerational (cultural) order as it is expressed in sightings of regulated engagement, administered desublimation, and complicity in social injustice across all tiers and dimensions of the historical hierarchy. In the context of the psycho-social life of the subject, my thinking on the problematic changed dramatically upon realizing that I was quite uncomfortable with the fact that the subject, the human, becomes less politically identifiable the more visible the extent of commodification. In other words, I kept encountering the problem of consequentiality of existing theory about the subjective experience, precisely because the prevading theory did not center on a specific subject. Tripartite concepts such as sublimation, desublimation, and repressive desublimation require a subject in order to gain their optimal political value. By focusing the discussion on the historical adolescent subject position, we gain a certain critical momentum from the historical material contextualization and the specific terms of psycho-social and physical relationality between the subject and society. I decided to ground the discussion in the historically material case of Western, metropolitan (that is, urban, post-industrial, primarily consumer) adolescents, specifically the group gendered male, since the existing literature predominantly fixates on their maladies. Countering the movement of extra-human abstraction, I situated the discussion of these complicated dynamics around the historical young subject who finds himself in the moment of a

Maladies of Consumer Subjectivity In the spirit of feminist theory, we cannot deny the existential complexity of subjectivity however accidentally formed it might be. People who come to see themselves as gamers, they already know who they are. What they want is a glimpse of who they could be if they were not stuck being themselves. Stuck in a material reality, as players they try to find something to lose themselves in. In their desire for that more is something very familiar, a part of themselves already. The middle classes are bound to reproductive conformity to consumer capital. Through their everyday lives, they are structurally, ideologically, and libidinally tied to the economy, which produces and reproduces their exploitation and subjugation. Millenials are misunderstood as a generation as the special nature of their social and political economic historical circumstance is not taken seriously in consideration of how their sense of self and self-consciousness has developed into being. Every political moment, every political economy has structural positions designated for its operant groups of individuals. The so-called millennials make up the current dominant economy’s adolescent metropolitan consumer class, tasked with reproducing the consumer economy, which underwrites the financial capital. In the melancholia inducing scenes from Zuccotti Park and the events alike where alternative imagination purported to reposition the role of modern communication technologies in the lives of its subjects,

192

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

constant social churning caused by the momentum of the recirculation of signs in the consumer economy. In this dynamic, the terms of the psycho-social context of the youth’s experience needed to be interrogated— namely, the attached phenomenon of social alienation, because that context exposes social reproductive processes as agents of institutionalization.

193

what we found instead were youth akin to the gamer, with a comparable libidinal economy, who were never anything more than liberal subjects just asking for the ideology not to contradict itself. At the center of the consumer libidinal economy pushed on the metropolitan adolescents is the subject who finds himself in an image of the consumer adolescent. It alleviates the personal responsibility over what is happening to him existentially. He freely buys into the identificatory fragments, because they provide comfort and soothe away from the internal stress brought upon by the desire that still finds a way to spill over through all the inevitably contradictory elements. And what are those contradictory elements? This new generation of consumer subjects has to have the fantasy of themselves as agents of their own making, individuals with a clear sense of what they want from the world and how to get it. Most crucial of all is the fact that the same group must also be internally motivated to seek the outlets of these fantasies through the economy, which means that their internal sense has to be already tied to the existing language—and as language, the reification serves the social and not the person. Tying the whole complex together, there must be a lack at the center of their sense of self that negatively motivates them to buy in. The consumer libidinal economy operating on the psycho-social level mirrors the ouoroboric circulation of the consumer economy. It exhibits the same perpetual self-consuming as its primary logic. Its core dynamo turns around an idea of over-valorization, over-narcissification of the mediated relations to objects of desire. I say this because the subject becomes their own agent of perpetuating consumption with mandates coming from the outside channeled from within. The attraction to the game libidinal economy is one of perpetual desire for stimulation, engagement, and

surprise, a continual chase with guaranteed loss in digital, mediated singularity. Within the confines of the gaming apparatus, the gamer subject is amalgamated between the gameplay and complementary stimulation loops like the oral stimulation of eating, aural simulation of sociality of binge-watching a familiar series, and psycho-pharmacological supplementing of consumer chemicals. The senses are heightened, strengthened by user interfaces; with each passing moment, one is asked to reinvest, and if the level of identification is too challenging, then you can get better. In the game world, you get to start over, to improve; effort gets to matter. It gets to be about you. Habituating open world games routinely, you get to know the place, cultivate the capacity to understand and know the entirety of its universe. You can actually live as if effort, desire to win, could even make a difference. The marketed fantasy always boils down to the same confinement in which the subject seeks the reduction of his thought and consciousness to choice-making under the dictum to advance, upgrade, level up, and always continue to accumulate. They are lonely, under-stimulated boys, playing for empowerment and freedom. For many of them, having grown up within the last major iteration of the consumer society, the ubiquitous ideology of technological utopia only fed their necessary splitness. Given the real world is so unchanging, compartmentalized, and alienating, consumer technology was to offer itself as another dimension of experience that could make the repetitive meaningful again. They cannot be blamed for having been set up to treat life as a force auxiliary to sustaining their televisual relation. After all it was a collective choice to displace the utopian dream of the post-economic ludic relation for the sake of economic usurpation of the whole possibility dormant within the dream itself.

194

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

195

In this chapter I want to focus singularly on the libidinal economy of the consumerized, mediated experience. In particular, I want to focus on what is being exploited in a person’s psychic economy for the sake of the consumer libidinal reproductive cycle’s churning motion. A Genealogy of the Transgenerational Sacrifice My intention has been to highlight the subordination of subject-formation to the vagaries of social reproduction. By insisting on calling this process psycho-social and not psychological-and-social, I tried to expose how the fundamental embeddedness of the individual subject in the historic conditions qualify his subjectivity.1 Holding to a critical political valiance of psycho-social dynamics between the subject and society confronts us with how the very curriculum of primary socialization, the bedrock on which the house of relationality will come to be built upon, relies heavily on the time-tested psycho-technology of traumatization. Trauma brings us to the dialectic of sublimation. As an experience of the unsublimated, its sheer force encourages repression. A child born into society is subjugated by familial childhood traumas, which appropriate the infantile psychosis caused by the incommunicability of early childhood. This appropriation, put to social-productive ends, results in a psychic economy in which internal dynamics of desire are tied to concepts and psychic containers, which in turn are pointed towards outward expression. In fact, there is a close relationship between the historical narrative of a culture and the trauma to which its children are subjected as they become members of the social organization. In terms of normative development, the structuring of the tripartite inner life is linked with the promise of avoiding further trauma by accepting the terms of repression.2 And historically this conception offers no commentary on the possibility of resistance to econo-

196

The Loot Loop

1. His subjectivity maps out across three dimensions: the psychic, the relational, and the ideational. Each corresponds to the dimension of subjectivity in which subjugation is historically substantiated: the psychic dimension to the psychological and affective structure of the individual; the relational to inter-subjective, and the ideational to ideology, language, and symbol consistency. These three conceptual parameters delineate the processes through which a specific structure constitutes the subject. 2. Horowitz (1971 p. 21) speaks to the societal reliance on traumatization for repressive socialization.

3. Ricoeur (2004), p. 54.

mization; nor does the theory address the historical failure of the political economy to integrate the older generations’ learned disavowal of political responsibility. In the case of the baby boomers, the yuppies, and now the millennials, the dominant generations of postwar American consumer society have clung to their economically integrated idealizations of past and future only so that they may find a way to convince themselves that they are still the authors of their lives. Speaking to this hallucinatory quality of an ideological resistance to being present, Ricoeur frames reactionary attentiveness to self-sameness as trauma affectation. In his words: Hauntedness is to collective memory what hallucination is to private memory, a pathological modality of the incrustation of the past at the heart of the present, which acts as a counterweight to the innocent habit-memory, which also inhibits the present, but in order to “act it”...not to haunt it or torment it.3 The hauntedness closes the circle of intergenerationality by spiraling in and out of personal memory. The hallucinatory living in fantasy, which is readily subjugated to the consumer economy, justifies the adults’ apparent selfishness to refuse the reality of the consumer performative principle established in the postwar era. When the hallucination is institutionalized as it is within the circuits of televisual mediation, the problem spills over the generational divides as the inaptness of adult generations becomes the narcissistic willingness to sacrifice their young for nothing more than the sake of stabilizing their own emotional situation from one moment to the next. The adults of the consumer society have long chosen to inebriate themselves on little more than ideology, refusing to acknowledge the potential for

Chapter Six

197

intergenerational empowerment against the conditions that once usurped their capacity for existential politics. Into the Economy of the Spill-over The psycho-politics of the human condition are revealed in the realm of socialization. The psycho-social situation of adolescents raises questions about the social construction of identity, political subjectivity and the possibility of a humanizing revolution that proactively moves beyond the master/slave splitting of the internal psychic universe. Sooner or later, we will have to find a way to a postcolonial future for the colonized interiority of consumer society. In earlier chapters I wanted to gesture towards this politics by drawing attention to how contemporary theory still naturalizes the formative experience of childhood even though it is socially and historically constructed, if not simply materially constituted and existing. Time and again I have observed established, respected theorists decide to draw seemingly arbitrary limits to possibilities. For example, while Butler argues that the psychic life of power is necessarily dictated by the existing social relations, which would open it up to political intervention, she still compromises with the dominant ideology by limiting that possibility by nature. For Butler, the moment in which primary identification is coercively established by the dominant’s power over the dominated is the decisive moment of subject formation that cannot be avoided or adjusted in some way.4 But, why this foreclosure? Allow me to lay out the logic within which Butler and psychoanalytic theorists from other walks of theoretical conviction tend to cohabitate. From the vantage of more elementary psychoanalysis, primary identification is the constitutive, subjective process that underpins the development of a child’s own agency. This primary identification is thought to be the process through

198

The Loot Loop

4.Butler (1997), see the introduction to the book.

5. Lacan (1977) pp. 37-38. 6. A matter of crystallization the talking about "something" fits the issues around the establishment of the one dynamic, and the concept that stands for the dynamics: Philosophical thinking has for its content neither the remainder after the cancellation of space and time, nor general findings about what is spatio-temporal. It crystallizes in the particular, in what is determined in space and time. The concept of the existent pure and simple is merely the shadow of the false one of being (Adorno (1964) p. 142). 7. Klein (1975).

which a child recognizes and internalizes the power of his parental unit. By identifying with it, by using the idealization as a mediating object, the child could adopt a sense of the possibility of embodying his own social competence. Additionally, the theory specifies that the unconscious is explicitly structured through the experience of language,5 so we can directly link primary identification to domination and ideology as language is always historically, politically loaded.6 Under this approach to subjectivity, to identify as a subject is to access the self through language, which of necessity happens within the ideology of a dominant power structure. Thus, socialization and subject-formation come to be co-constitutive: subjects become both themselves and themselves-for-others through their entanglements of guilt and attachment to their parents as authorities and defining love-objects.7 If the point is that phenomenological experiences of socialization produce the subject itself—the necessary grounds for autonomy and agency (one cannot have agency if one is not a subject)— even as socialization is a process of the subjugation of the subject to the group, then would it not be the case that technical changes to the course of relational reproduction would bring about social construction of a different kind of subjectivity altogether? In fact, there is much to motivate such an inquiry. There is a set of psycho-social complications in transgenerational relations that occur in the consumer society that overdetermine the psycho-social dynamics of social reproduction, turning the surplus-extractive spirit (the dynamo of social and cultural self-perpetuation) of the Oedipal against itself for the sake of extra exploitation. This shock does not only cause a violence on the imaginative that results in anti-social regression, but also in the usurpation of the psychic surplus, which effaces the emergence of self-awareness as memory of the surplus could lead to exposing the repeating limit

Chapter Six

199

of historical thinking, pushing for the alternative, for something more. The introversion directs the surplus to the inside—effectively de-socializing (and de-politicizing) desire for the sake of momentary self-satisfaction. I would like to define this concept negatively, because it denotes something quite ephemeral—that something which is compromised in the person during the habitual constitution of the mediated avatar-subject. Traditional theory presumes that youth are meant to desire the spiraling perpetuation of social reproduction by pouring their psychic surplus into participation in social rituals that reproduce cultural repressive conditioning. The involvement youth grow into serves an intergenerational function. As reality fails to meet the demands of the subject constituted to desire, the social tie within the very conception of the psycho-sociality (the grounding in language) conjures up rituals to promise eventual fulfillment in fantasy or after-life. In real life this process boils down to balancing existential anxiety with generational self-awareness. As Erikson would remind us of that taken-for-granted conservative dictum, children are supposed to abide by intra-tribal codes.8 As a prize for their submission, they become incorporated into the psycho-social matrix through their personal negotiation of their desires and codes, a process which serves to socialize their inner lives by legitimizing and deepening the value of the codes in their relating to the world through objects. The surplus can be a way to track the very important question of the accounted and unaccountable. As cultural allocations of psychical energy naturally result in spill-over in the case of the subjective (let us posit one as between the inner desire for mimesis and the cultural space for such a desire), whether and how culture directs the potential remainder of what it is not able to account for determines its politics of responsibility for the future of the psychic economy of the young. In other

200

The Loot Loop

8. Erikson (1963).

words, precisely because there is still a spilling over, the call to the self-reflective dialectic is to dislocate the established concepts which have lost their footing on the nature and power of the surplus. Actual material experience always spills over the concepts that we assign them. We spill over the categories we assign ourselves, and the perpetual motion of cultural reproduction across generations depends on successful regulation of this spilling over of psychic surplus. The social reproductive tendency is married to administering the expenditure of this surplus. We still create psychic surplus all the time even though we are seldom conscious of its power. Our unconsciousness of the extraction is already reconstituted as someone else’s profit. In the psycho-political context, the significance of psychic surplus brings us to this simple question: who should dictate where the psychic surplus goes? In any case, if we recognize that the language of conceptualization is tied to the project of domination, then we must be critical of the categories we use to build imaginings of the human, and interrogate them for whether they rationalize a human out of possible empowerment. Affective Terms of Gaming Surplus-Extraction A subject is constructed through libidinal reactions of pleasure or displeasure in the process of playing a video game—an MMO or any other game that deploys an avatar-subject relation. The game structure conditions the player to its equations of object relations by dispensing satisfaction through performance-based rewards, but also through increments of hailing a very particular subjectivity from within the consumer—the gambler. Gamers attain small bits of pleasure from a successful draw from the loot lottery or from reaching a further-empowering level. In any case, the established relation goes to strengthen the formation of the avatar subject in the mind of the playing person. It is

Chapter Six

201

why a person cannot simply break the ties with the game and give it up when it becomes unpleasurable on the conscious level. The repetition compulsion is built into what is marketed as enjoyable about the game, where the enjoyable is the affective instance (and then the memory of that satisfying linkage) of being stimulated by the game apparatus. The person, first deconstructed along sensory lines, is reconstituted through the avatar as the nexus. The paradoxical relation, which reconciles the contradiction between subjugation and subjection, is found here in the consummating act of agency of the gamer. In the very activity of relating to an avatar and its stimulants, in the affectivity of the relation, in the very form auto-stimulation, is where ideology would have once operated—making up for the limits of possibilities in light of material scarcity. The grounds of reading psycho-technology as a commodifying apparatus lies in instances when social relationality is substituted by gaming, social media, and gadgetization under a regime of repressive identification meant to perpetuate consumption. That economic rationalization is dangerous. In video games, ideology is deployed so that the very activity of valorization (carried through an intermediary of an avatar) has been made accessible to commodification. There is a whole branch of gaming that deals with culling the necessities of the dead time, the time in-between when nothing happens yet one must stay alert. The variety is broad, but they all have a common element of satisfying immediate, micro-expressions of reward, encouraging voluntary reduction in consciousness. For instance, in Minecraft, the avatar is you, the player, simply reduced to the economy of the game with proportional agency. Sandbox games like Minecraft do not have a storyline they impose on the player, because the psycho-technic stimulation they offer functions to incorporate the gamer’s own desire to narrativize. The player is himself, and this lack of ex-

plicit avatarization opens up to a more systemic identification, which is then guided towards valued ends hidden beneath achievements and rewards. Since people within the walls of the Empire must identify with the fixed position of consumers as their primary mode of social and economic participation (and also, that of being imperial agents), being a gamer, constituting one’s self as an avatar-subject, allows them to tolerate their political-economically necessary role. Dedication has a weight of its own, which is guided by loyal identification with the object as a continual source of subject stability. It is as if the avatar subject dictates by communicating what is good, what is valuable, what is important to continue to chase, and what the points of bodily exhaustion are that need to be repressed. Gaming becomes a political economic project in social-engineered control of agency and subjectivity, because it creates subjectivity around ideological role-playing: ideology says it could be you, even though society today does not ask that we reconcile the positions of domination but only that we tolerate and live with each other. In this idea class and role are reduced to signifying the same value. Technology provides a simulation of genuineness. More specifically, in what it lacks (that is, genuine human affect), it simplifies, reifies, lending to commodification, and thus completing a perfect circle. This is where the failures and complexities of interpersonal relations on the familial and otherwise institutional level are exploited by commodification. It is an alternative to therapy in the same way that identification with authorial voices is an alternative to self-consciousness. Construction of ideological materiality is what creates consciousness. This materiality is class- and castebased, but immanently it is also affective, engendering, subjectivizing. Avatar-identification is not so much a vehicle for historical conciliation as much as it is one for

202

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

203

libidinal and cultural incorporation. The identification provides the script for the acting subject. Digital technology, by means of mediative control, is able to offer a customized experience of that sacred, libidinally laden relationality. In this view, gaming becomes a repressive means for the regulation of deployed identifications. Individually we all have subject positions which are irreconcilable with the dominant machines because of ideological contradictions on the level of subjective experience. There is a certain spillover, a surplus, that happens whenever the ideological containers do not fit over the subject. But, this misfitting is resolved by the materiality of projectively identifying, that is, the embodied affect and consciousness of experience. In the end we end up producing the order that represses all of us because we cannot let go of our own narcissism—in the end I will end up doing what will be best for me. After all, labor is dependent on the reification of humanity into economical value. Ideology defines that territory of symbolic meaning, because it mediates between those symbolic orders and the libidinal realm of the human materiality. That materiality, in turn, affects the self to create consciousness ordinarily perpendicular to its structural container. On the subjective level, repetition enables gradual alienation, which makes the valorization of laboring commodifiable as political economic labor. That alienation stems from the difference between the first time one does an activity (inexperience, newness) and how one does the same activity after however long it takes to learn to separate the activities in the experience from weighing on consciousness. At this latter point the original experience has become a source of value, a raw resource in the repetitive mining for what it can (or, is perceived to be able to) provide. In order to deprive the human of its naturalized sociality and socially created capacity, the human needs to be convinced to become subject to an extractive iden-

204

The Loot Loop

9. Avalanche (2013). Disney has since decided to pull the plug on Disney Infinity. Announcement of the news once again confirmed the limited understanding of the psycho-technology by its very exploiters.

tification—mediating by the avatar as if it could contain the self and its desires, it is a projected identification along Althusserian lines that in its fiction makes the subject predictable, thus regularizable and directable. The way to sustain a predictable relation would be to zero in on the predictable or moldable structure and maximize its course-directive value. Here, repetition, alienation, and valorization are intimately important processes for this sort of social reproduction. Each one is put to purpose in socialization and political economy. Socialization provides an affective (material) primer for ideological syncing of present historical materiality with the economically-verified symbolic, thus tying the subject to the economy; the political economy secures the suitable (socially productive) exploitation. The libidinal economy of psychic surplus is already operational. It is the crux of the consumer economy, which gears the consumer society—in turn the consumer economy powers the rocking necessary for the waves of accumulation and dispossession in finance capital, thus underwriting the whole capitalist system. The Disney Child Let us take a look at Disney Corporation’s sole and shortlived MMO venture, Disney Infinity.9 Even though its target market was obviously intended to be children between the ages of five and twelve, the elements of the device signal to the kind of commodification of habituated psychic relations and the direction in which they are heading. My fear is that the developing unconscious technical proficiency will eventually meet the ideological deployment of psycho-technology for profit. The incorporation begins on top of prior psycho-technic involvement—brought up by surrogates of time-strapped parents, the child is put in the position where the only way to stimulation is through televisual affect. Chances are he has been watching his favorite heroes on the Dis-

Chapter Six

205

ney Channel every day after school. Within his personal history with the commercial medium, he is already used to advertisements regularly interrupting his identification with the characters on screen. During one of these interruptions, which the child has also learned to enjoy (because they introduce possible new objects for his relating), an ad directs his already-fixed gaze to a gaming console that promises to extend the mediation of the televisually-guided experience by a ‘live-action’ experience of what he otherwise could only audience. In the commercial, the child is walked through an identification—an actor instructs him to physically place his favorite figurine onto a platform at the center of the game console. Then, the figurine appears on-screen, and the child is presented with the end result of becoming visually immersed into the virtual world of Disney Infinity, where he gets to realize his fantasy of embodying his hero in a fitting world. This gaming console bridges the gap between his imagination and reality by incorporating his favorite character’s action figure. From the toy to the avatar, the child has been led through deepening domains of commodified identification—from the hero-toy to the hero-toy-avatar. The motivation behind the very deepening of the relation is built on the back of the perpetual search for the surplus—audience labor is no longer profitable enough! In other words, this psychological process of synchronization serves the capitalist objective of providing more efficient (productive) consumption. The process of plugging yourself into Disney’s device is especially magical because it is punctuated by a physical act of confirmation. Real-world play is transitioned into digital play as the child physically places the totem of his fantasy into the game console. He is instructed to literally place the toy avatar into which he wants to reduce himself.

Until this new relation, tapping into a low-grade, hallucinatory avatarization was something that the child was able to do for himself through imaginative projection of his private (unmediated) role-play. To the extent that he can realize his dormant fantasy relating to the avatar, the child has limited options. The avatar version of a (toy) subject that the child has already identified is not simply visualized as being submerged into a virtual world. The child is not allowed to actually satisfy his basic fantasy of becoming that favored cartoon hero. Instead, the child only gets to become the caricaturized toy-version of his on-screen hero. We can imagine why Disney decided to draw a line in their commercial facilitation of imaginative projection—whatever the on-screen avatar, it must be readily convertible into a toy, which the child will inevitably seek once the allure of televisual identification wears off under the weight of repetitive monotony of the game. At once confirming and repressive, this is a telling development in the context of consumer libidinal incorporation. The very ritual of starting the game offers an ideological resolution to the reproduction-value problem of consumer capitalism in a way that ultimately sacrifices the experience of the subject. Reproducibility contradicts capitalist value (which is based on a psychology of scarcity), so the ideological resolution comes in the form of an implicit lesson for the child. He learns that he can never be his beloved Captain Buzz Lightyear, but that he can get as close to being him as possible by buying the figurine, setting it into the game console, and renting out a duration of identification which satisfies him through a cocktail of physiological and ideological stimulation. Imagination itself is thus replaced by immersion, its commodity form. The Disney Infinity apparatus demonstrates the importance of considering the technics involved in the

206

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

207

process. In this example, we have a young child interacting with the device. His ways of imagining and play are channeled towards amalgamating commodity mediation—first the identification with the character in film, then the action figure, and finally the avatar. The ability to imagine also plays a critical role in the child’s development of self-conception, his development of subjectivity and consciousness. Imagination plays a critical, political role in the psycho-social development of the child into an autonomous individual. Therefore, there is an overlaying of intentions here: on the one hand consumer capital intervenes in the child’s play by introducing a ritualized activity that will train him to find a mediating commodity (a toy) in order to access the objects of his own imagination. On the other hand, play and imagining-through-objects have a developmental role in the child’s life, where their immediate consideration within the socius makes them agents of socialization. In order to make sense of what might be going on here, we need to see the political dimension of the psycho-social processes. I have tried to argue that overlaying technology on top of socialization does not support the popular view that it is merely a benign phenomenon, but in fact the opposite; as it is realized within the age of consumer capitalism, digital technology is not a neutral tool, but in its very structure, embodies the historical, political economic impetus that reaches back to the television and audience labor at the dawn of the postwar culture industry. In any case, the involvement of imagination and projection in Disney Infinity confirms that digital technology, as the transitive medium for immersive gaming, operates by manipulating the psychosocial structure of human experience that can only be concretely called ideological. An enormous development lurks in this proposition; the psychic territory between the material and

208

The Loot Loop

10. See Kordela (2012).

the imaginary has been compromised. In the past, the political economy and ideology functioned in sync through bridging social institutions. Nonetheless this often meant that the ideal, metaphysical universe and the dominant political economy offered a semblance of social stability when they could act compatibly, but they could not be guaranteed to perform in sync. In fact, historical narratives of revolutionary dissent have tended to emerge from disillusionment and revolt against the social structures that stem from a clear, ideologicallyconfirmed subject-position. In comparison, in the socalled ludic era, the game universe allows a person to have a virtual experience of the ideological—an experience of the world according to the political economy’s rationalizing self-narration. The result is the colonization of the last semblance of resistance to incorporation. Exploitation of Psychic Surplus In an equation of play being commodified through games for surplus-value, where surplus value is not directly the source of exchange value but the perpetuation of the object relational practice (read: self-commodification), the exploited substance is not material but psychic, and deeply subject-formative in nature. Commodified identification is deeply intertwined with the kind of surplus-value it is posed to commodify. It defines the form and extent of the activity, affectation, and object-relation it will govern, and by co-composition, makes the initially existing as both valued, and then reified (or value-loaded) as capital.10 This is how social media companies can be valued in hundreds of billions of dollars by the sheer fact that they regularly capture the attention of millions of users. Moreover, consequentially for the adolescent subject, every time the surplus is reified, the territory of the original shrinks in proportion to the exploitation. What shrinks every time is

Chapter Six

209

what increasingly comes to be defined as being-ableto-do-for-oneself as it is excised from paying-to-get-itdone-by-someone-else. Gadgetized consumer identification turns the person (more so the personae that the person accepts as a subject) into value with real economic weight. It dehumanizes materially by turning the constitutively psychosocially human into a means of exploitation. The televisual enables the commodification of signs and signification, and then the interactive technology enables the deployment of psycho-technological incorporation, which builds its edifice upon the affective apparatuses of the televisual—in the case of consumerization this means that you continue to have a profitable consumer synced up between the presumably different realms of consumer experience. On this level the surplus is self-conception and future capacity for that sort of valiance or form of self-conception. It is wrapped up with self determination, agency, all the way through to eventual self-conceptualizing production of subject and concept, persona, idealization and identification, mirroring and imitation, and avatarization. In this sense the person’s potential self-consciousness is continually decreased for the perpetuation of extraction of surplus value. In other words, surplus is where consciousness could have been—the constitutive part of the political economy of attention formation. This is surplus value in psychic economy, the realm of materiality of domination in its most basic terms. Accounting for the surplus happens through regulating and controlling the processes of subject/object relations. Each partial gamer-relationality is able to define a surplus—that is its technological value. And each surplus is layered on a previous in terms of replacing the originary with a persona that suits the system, and also can simulate that which was excised to be

turned into surplus value. But, reduction in terms of being the kernel of the repressive element in the new mediated relationality, is a byproduct, and not yet a direct intent of the process of commodification precisely because surplus extraction is profit driven. In other words, the short-sighted intentions of the capitalists still leave room for resistance to maneuver. Almost immediately, there is the problem of qualitative repression as this initially identified subject-re-constitutive surplus is recirculated. Recall the Adorno side of the experience: mimesis, in being subjective, affects the subject towards a conception, but that being is singular, and not a one-to-one copy of the already exiting. In this way it is a ground for politics of sustaining selfdetermination amidst all the processes that would fall under the culture industry. But, if the surplus is equal to the subjective, the qualitative, which is redirected to fuel the continued churning of the mediation that commodifies (since the mediation offers only a partial mirroring and circulation), then what is the impact of a continual recirculation of the initial human surplusvalue on the life of the subject? The political economy in which psychic surplus is the primary value is arguably still around the corner. But, games do come before the inevitable laborization of digital technology—they are a socializing primer just like play is a primer for labor in society. So, what does it mean that games prime for exploitation? In the banal instances of televisual experience such as fetishizing high definition resolution of the televisual mediation, we become content to be fascinated by the intricacy of the detailing of the televisual objects. What I have called auto-stimulation is prescribed as the drug to null entropyinducing consciousness of repetition. Imagine the wider use of this phenomena, the way in which this exaggerated idea shows up in everyday life. Gaming ultimately displaces the problem of reification

210

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

211

in labor, where consciousness is compromised to underwrite production and consumption, by substituting attention (that is, fixation, identification, and attention) for consciousness. Pleasure limited to self-stimulated kind becomes the conciliatory object traded for unconsciousness and agentlessness (that is, ideological consciousness). This is truly the dawn of one-dimensionality. And in a different realm of the primary, in our historical moment, for this specific historical group of adolescents, it is being further defined, reified, and commodified in the sense of a physical, most material form of consciousness, that of attention-formation and identification. Get high, embrace the fragmenting feelings, avoid sensible attention—all parts of a complex form of the consumer libidinal economy. This is a catastrophe in the historical material reality of the consumerclass adolescents’ libidinal economy. Moreover, this is an act of sacrifice on the part of consumer society—the desperate attempt to prolong the life of a system of valorization, reproduction and redistribution; justification for the subjugation of humanity for just a bit longer; for extending the survival of the system of consumerist repression day in and day out. Give up the spirit, and replace it with bodily satisfaction and ideological consciousness. As such, the metropolitan society is a self-devouring society—an institutionalized ouroboros. This is precisely reflected in the role of gaming in the ideological lives of the metropolitan adolescents. They are ideologically sacrificed and raised on a deficit of consciousness. Gaming, the preoccupying of the conscious by stimulating attention formation through ideological identification (projection and introjection), takes form as prescribed fantasy, and replaces the possibility of pre-standardized, uninstitutionalized subjecthood. The psychic surplus which would have informed self-consciousness is thus

Boredom and Psychic Surplus With psychic surplus the idea is that there is always more desire than can be contained by the object promised to meet it. There is a surplus from the meeting, and that remainder of desire is supposed to be directed towards another, future object. The person is also propelled through self-motivation to pursue this track. Thus far, the industry is not completely keen on this bit. They do know that marketing can be effective because it promises more than the commodity will deliver, since larger fantasy leads to the kind of surplus momentum we mentioned already. But then the question becomes one of directing the surplus. And this is where the avatarization of the subject is the key. The dimension of the affective is particularly important. We can begin to get a sense of this in what is signaled by boredom, being bored, what is boring in contemporary discourses. “How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom,” writes Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, “when the complications of life made me lose the very germ of all freedom!” Boredom is an especially rich phenomenological concept as an affective state often enveloping consciousness. Culturally the concept also captures a common experience of mismatch of surplus caused by desire and fantasy being bigger than the object. In the case of boredom, self-stimulation with exaggerated affect becomes a way to recuperate some of it. In contemporary society, boredom is deeply intertwined with commodity-regimented televisual diet and consumer object relations. Boredom is specifically important in the context of the politics of presence, because the psycho-social relations motivating boredom create disciplinary habits around self-consciousness.

212

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

turned into an already surplus, accounted for in the circuits of consumerization.

213

For instance, Phillips argues that boredom is about waiting for oneself,11 as a state of consciousness divorced from existential purpose. It is a waiting for the confirming recognition, that is, identifying with an authority that plucks the subject out of the state of discomforting consciousness, and authorizes another dose of soothing self-satisfaction. In the context of consumer socialization, thanks to habituated gadgetized mediation, all of regulative roles need to be prefigured, since capitalism reproduces them for the sake of profit-extraction. It is here that the subject could be said to be reduced to a libidinal object-subject, an avatar-subject. Boredom comes to symbolize the regiment of commodified alienation of fantasy to the extent that one begins to view attention, presence, and self-consciousness as laborious (even elective) tasks. Incidentally, boredom harbors the potential for a critical refusal against conformity to the political economy, even if only latently so. As such boredom is also a mark of alienation and even commodification, signaling a loneliness, a substitute for the displaced recognition of the real. With boredom as a marker of time outside of stimulation, we arrive at the precipice of the domain of autostimulation—that in the case of auto-stimulation, there exists no possible cognitive competitor precisely because auto-stimulation negates consciousness in its present. The affective enclosure that boredom signals over consciousness elaborates on the structural reasons for why an avatar-subject relationality becomes attractive: the game is not about having or not having, but about the enjoyment that can be derived from occupying a subject position in the world of rules that prosper within an ideology of material scarcity. Boredom is an organizing concept latent across the discourses that purport to address adolescent psychosocial pathology. According to the researchers, in one

214

The Loot Loop

11. Phillips (1994).

12. Griffin (1993).

instance, drunkenness and immersion have the same root cause in the minds of the adolescent subjects.12 It stands for a particular nihilism, a desire to refuse the awareness of the self and the regime of commodification by immersion into non-presence—subjectlessness through attentionally-fixed projective syncing of identificatory processes. The side effect of this regime is the standardization of a state of depression whenever the stimulation is absent. This is an economically productive affective position of the subject, since depressive positions in object relations are suitable for conspicuous consumption. In ethnographic research that touches on the lives of home front youth, where boredom surfaces as a theme, it is usually in relation to the question of how youth organize their libidinal economies—how they negotiate their affective states after school and outside of their institutionally required attention-formation and participations. Adolescents are observed filling up their time outside the compulsory institutions with binging Netflix, impulsive social media participation, and immersion in gaming. They are quickly associated with the historical desire of the gambler, which is to say they develop emotional and pseudo-therapeutic relations to the consumer objects and experience. But even in the example of chasing the monadic self, there is an instance in which commodification can be seen to manipulate the reproductive power of habituation and repetition in socialization of a given process. The monad-self is similar to the not-yet-self traumatized into subjectivity. But, this is a simplification; the monad-self covers up the fact that what is being plucked at is a desire to not be present. The monad is an affectively regularized subject, deployed for consumer reproductive ends through processes of commodified identification and its related object-relational psycho-social processes. The monad finds a subject in

Chapter Six

215

the avatar, and represents a desire to return to a singularity, a longing for the kind of reconciled or non-oppositional subjectivity, a sync between consciousness and being without contradiction, static, residue, or feedback. This is a desire to have a consciously reduced affective subjectivity, a return to a simpler rationality where no psychic surplus will ever threaten the semblance of the consumer self or the status quo. In the end what is being played out is a generational conclusion that one cannot escape institutional regulation or repressive domination.13 Therefore, the best course of action is to use technology as a means to selectively log out of one’s own historical and social fixity whenever one can. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with people wanting to live out their fantasies of becoming and being recognized as someone else in an alternate universe. But there is a politics of psycho-sociality lying dormant in the vicissitudes of this cultivated capacity to choose immersion and non-presence. In the second world, you can satisfy your manufactured desire to embody another kind of personality. The problem comes into focus when we ask about the quality of what is meant by consumerizing socialization, or, the socialization and condition for self-reproducing consumerism: you can enjoy and embody as long as you can sustain the immersive mediation which is already directly plugged into the already existing political economy. Therefore there is an operative libidinal economy to this apparatus that extends from the political economy. As the libidinal economy becomes an extension of the political economy, exploitation moves to colonize interiority—there is a psychic corollary to economic exploitation. It is in this context that a new advent of surplus-extraction begins to take shape.  

216

The Loot Loop

13. What comes to mind is Marcuse’s (1974) cautionary speculation that the consumer capitalist industrial military complex will organize its own structural response to the rising tide of subjective protest at the dissatisfying quality of post-industrial life.

Interlude: The Emancipatory Principle The intervention of this work is largely borne out of my reoccurring puzzlement with the seeming disconnect between the quality of research and the phenomenological and political economic readings of historically specific sites of commodification, institutionalization, and socialization of the consumer side of advanced capitalism. Gaming offers us one such site, and it is important, because, in its interactivity and its phenomenological terms of experience, it exposes the concretely technical nature of how processes of ideological identification and auto-stimulation become usurped into the consumer economy as technologies of commodification. A reading of gadgetized techno-identification enables us to critically consider gaming as a machine that effectuates surplus-extraction to traverse and exploit across the domains of ideology (imagination and fantasy), the mechanical psyche (its neural and cognitive behaviorized structures and patterns), the emotional life as interconnected to both real and imagined stimulus, and the world of semiotic reproduction (that is, the world of symbols, displaced and/or deterritorialized objects and ideological place-holders). We must accept the tall order to weave all of these dimensions towards an understanding of the requisite political discourse. Naturally my presentation suffers from exaggeration, but, as it regards the political complicity of gaming, whether gaming studies could ever become self-critical and consequentially political in the sense of asking questions about the complicity of its own conceiving technology, I attempt to raise questions that try to create critical potential by crossing ideological, material, and psycho-social realms for a fitting conception of politics—that of human autonomy, self-determination, and ethics that arise from considering surplus-extraction as a definitive site in the course of this determination.

Chapter Six

217

In the course I have tried to outline the shape that the exploitative mechanism takes in the specific instance of gaming as an ideological apparatus. A continual immediately-accessible site of this surplus-extraction is where and when immersion and non-presence show up. In light of what is signaled by gaming, what is alarming is that capitalism seems to have resolved the problem of singularity and consumption at the centers of the global imperial order precisely where a political perspective could be most effective. At sites such as grinding in WoW while watching someone else narrate their gaming on Twitch.tv all the while binging on familiar Netflix TV shows, a person is hypnotized by the sensational combination of physical and psychical stimulation to interpret the sensation as qualitative satisfaction. As such, there is no longer a need for a territorializing subject as the values of traditional (even primary) identification are now guaranteed by fragmentary experiences situated in affect and auto-stimulation. But, there is still time to act, because the modulation seems to be still largely done unconsciously; Capital is still primarily concerned with immediately-capitalizable surplus-extraction. When the capitalist interests become self-conscious on the nature of the avatar-subject technology which they have been underutilizing, the consumer classes in the metropoles will begin to directly participate in persona-(re)production, preparing people to sell ever new personas to themselves and their other counterparts. This will be the dawn of a new social economy at the expense of critical self-consciousness that could refuse its mode of production, and even more importantly, its complicity to global capital violence. By then, they all will be so alienated from their consciousness of their labor, that they will not recognize what is happening. It will be the dawn of the politico-libidinal economy. In the unlikely instances that the consciousness

will still arise, it will get swept up by the exploitative value. This is a way of saying that we are living in a transitional period between an old and a new governmentality. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, certainly Foucault and Stiegler have already made this argument, but they have also pointed to the already existing as the new limit. Their notion of what is politically-feasible is thus limited. The problem seems to be with surplusextraction, and not one that somehow evades clarity and easily slips into mystification. Critical theory, psychoanalytic theory, and various other cultural theory traditions offer still relevant theoretical innovations. But, these theoretical discourses are often incomplete, partial, and disjointed, which is why I wanted to synthesize them anew around an established ideological subject (the metropolitan adolescent), and follow out the implications into the political realm. In the remainder of this section, I want to briefly summarize how the project brings together the disjointed theories relevant to the problematic at hand. I was able to synthesize the theories by territorializing them to the same scope, addressing the same historicallyconstituted subject experience and ideology—that of an adolescent metropolitan gamer-subject. In the Domain of Ideology, Imagination and Phantasy: The direct industrial use of psycho-technologies is novel. For one, the apparatus differs from Althusser’s conception primarily in being directly industrially conceived. In the case of Althusser’s theory, since he did not have a theory of technology, interpellation served to locate a subject-constitutive, historical material regime of object relations in a political economy. The theory of interpellation needed to be extended to be relevant to the everyday experience within consumer culture. It needed to recognize the advent of gadgets that can mediate and contain bits informing interpellation. This resulted in a sharpening of the political stake surrounding

218

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

219

the avatar-subject relation as real not only within the self-formative object relations discourse but also the consumer-creating psycho-technological ones. In the chapter on affective, audience, and cognitive labor, I also suggested that we politicize the potential in other practices that fall under the banner of immaterial labor, that of investment, or valorization of relation or object. Audiences work to construct themselves as audiences, which works to both perpetuate consumption as well as guarantee to prolong their engagement with commodity. Audiences actively participate in constructing themselves as audiences, because of their labors of valorization, which secure the consumptive practice—the fact that people are invested by having worked to interpellate themselves. When gaming is read as an instrumentalization of already existing psycho-social patterns of relations open to politically structuring manipulation, what we begin to see is how mediative consumer technology can enable the exploitation of such standards. Consumer technology, the means of televisuality (communicative and otherwise), serves the structural role of positioning the metropolitan publics to increasingly specialized forms of ideological reproduction in the global circuits of capitalist accumulation and dispossession. This subjugation serves to perpetuate consumption by commodifiable-object dependence. In the Domain of the Mechanical Psyche: Read in the context of object relations, because of its consideration of the particular experience of material-imaginary relations (and the role of subjectivity in consciousness and historical-subject-formation), the ideological reproduction that takes place does so on a substantive, qualitative, or material level. That is its allure for persons to participate in their own commodification. In this view smartphones, gaming consoles, computers, laptops, tablets, televisions, all fit on a spectrum as technologies to liberalize14 object relations; the more com-

220

The Loot Loop

14. Meant in the neoliberal sense, to deregulate, to disinvest public interest on the subject, to allow capitalism to commodify and marketize.

pletely that the televisual technologies mediate and gadgetize social and self-relationalities, the more that that technology enables potentially commodifiable exploitation. A critical insight into the functioning of consumer libidinal economy appears when we consider how this apparatus functions in gaming on its bodily, substantive psycho-social basis. The substitute satisfaction that gaming provides does so through bodily stimulation being habituated to align with a constructed interpellative experience. In other words, the substitutive satisfaction satisfies mechanically; it can do it consciously and unconsciously—both affectively or interpellatively, since ideology is the complex of imaginary relations to real relations. In the Domain of Semiotic Reproduction: Immediately, as concerns the stability of archetypal reproductions, as technology interrupts the social reproduction within families living under the reign of consumer society, the younger generations, who are meant to be subjects to the transference and identification of the parents towards an idealized idea of adult futurity, are exposed to increasingly larger sets of images and icons that refract off of the familially established regiment of object relations, drawing its directive and pedagogical power from structural relationality, and securing surplus extraction from thereabouts. The problem rests with the fact that these other-worldly experiences do not originate from a utopian intent——the very means of its combined spectacle come drenched in various ideologies of efficiency, productivity, futurity, individualism, aesthetization, apolitics. As such this is a sighting of a real structure of ideological reproduction on the central (metropolitan) circle of the consumption-tasked classes of global capitalism. In the Domain of Emotional Life: I chose to politicize object-relations as a discourse on socialization through an excavation of the kind of surplus that is being di-

Chapter Six

221

rected away from the immediate life of the person towards some profitability and reproduction. This is where the consideration of adolescence as class will appear. When object relations are politicized, addiction to gadgetized mediations is shown to be just the very visible tip of a seriously exploitative economic tool for perpetuating consumption. With direct implications for a person’s capacity to cultivate self-consciousness, when mediative practices are routinized, they directly impact one’s capacity for self-determination. Thus, the situation of metropolitan adolescents (both young and adult) becomes one of a particular ideological subjectivity, which carries many of the structural imprints of its economic necessity. Interestingly enough, the regulated, contained state of consumer consciousness remains inert, incapacitated away from political self-consciousness for as long as it is medically treated. When the four domains are crossed, what becomes clear is the necessity of politicizing social reproduction, because the commodification of ideology and its psycho-technical apparatuses only bring about economization without regard for the fleeting life of the subjugated. A politics of socialization requires that we pose some critical questions: what is the point of subjugation, of the choices made in particular subject-formation? How is it that alien young generations are usurped and neutralized into becoming agents of reproduction themselves regardless of the historical material political economy; how is it that this keeps happening even in light of arguably most extensive commodification-geared liberalization of object relations? To put it another way, the task requires that we seriously consider that people have been deliberately subjected to socializing by technology with the assumption that commodity fetishism is a productive social good; that capitalist colonization of the semiotic and techno-libidinal is agreeable— in fact a productive good; that some might even have

utopian aspirations—even though it actually turns out that those apologists often mean that they are trying to create perfect intelligent machines, which in turn confirms all other ideological convictions (such as self-interestedness and the algorithmization) necessary to perpetuate the misrecognition of psycho-technology, and enable unconscious social reproduction of the classes of metropolitan consumer society. In the case of metropolitan adolescents, we can see that particular neurotic-alignment to economy happens in institutional space and time. Habituation, that is, traumatization and repetition, are the means by which reproduction is predicated to occur. This process amounts to a particular institutionalization of a self-interpellating subject in the gadgetized mediation of the adolescent gamer’s object relations. The only thing that the gamer wants, what he ultimately accepts subjugation and mediation for, is captured in the time-control of games—pause, fail, try again, learn what is coming, exploit the seeming predictabilities of the game engine, and reinterpret the alleviation of the bodily stress as satisfaction. This is where a perspective of psycho-politics is relevant as a political consideration of object-relations reproduction and transmission with specific ideological and political-economically relevant consistencies—a politics of social reproduction from the perspective of the person with all his potential for consciousness and autonomy. I remain convinced that only such politics can critically engage with processes such as gaming-interpellation that contribute to the upholding of particular ideological structuring, generationalization of political economic participation or reproduction, sedimentation of laboring types and characters, and streamlining of the libidinal economies into the larger political economies. Just the mere acknowledgment of the pervasive use of psycho-technology is still too controversial, be-

222

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

223

cause as a technology, it makes up for something crucially missing in the lives of people who habituated gaming as part of their everyday libidinal diets. As it turns out, the affective terms of consumer libidinal economy are the materialization of ideological value in the life of the prosumer. In the age of digital technologies, which should be liberating humanity beyond the confines of immediacy and strict conventional materiality, what we get instead is the replacement of the historical territory with a simulated one in which its offering of perfect freedom is actually its complete opposite, a fantasy of enjoyable, arrested repetition. In this way, these isolated, kinetic-stimulation-based ideological supplants satisfy to justify what essentially amounts to displacement of consciousness. Gaming, via televisual valorization practices, creates and satisfies that lack of consciousness. It sublimates the desire for recognition, and desublimates it as an opportunity for attention capturing identification. What emerges is a picture of a carefully attuned socially-constructed subjectivity. Whereas autonomy and self-determination are guided by healthy bouts of primary narcissism, in gaming, they are initially subsumed and eventually replaced by subjection and subjugation. This is where the libidinal economy is tied to the political economy via lessons from the ideological logic, which utilizes the knowledge traced from the development of personhood and various subjectivities, the formation of the subject and the development of selfawareness. Most critically, perhaps, are the sites where this redirection is set to occur—sites where the person’s sense of self and the world is mediated—the body and idea, the affect and symbol. In other words, the liberalization of object relations leads to the re-appropriation of the means of socialization as political institutionalization to train consciousness via ideology (as both bodily technology and attention-gathering psycho-

15. As we have discussed, there is a lineage to this logic that originates with a contingent of digital-capital theorists who drew a line with the limits of poststructuralism, and specifically, affective theory. The limitation of these works is a common one. They lay out what they view as symptoms of ‘something gone wrong.’ For one, Simondon (2012) presents us with an ontological critique of behavioral psychology by pointing to the misrecognition at the point of ontogenesis, but then he retreats into a metaphysics instead of a metapolitics. Similarly, contemporaries such as Bentacourt (2007) situate the affective state of distraction, but then turn to state-level politics for an argument about responsibility, which mirrors Stiegler’s (2010) theorizing of fragmentation of attention as a problem of intergenerational psycho-social relations that also reduces the fragmentation as a problem of classic personality. In other words, instead of elaborating an immanent critique through analytic concepts, they retreat to traditional European tropes of Enlightenment values. Political economic understanding of labor and surplus, and psychoanalytic understanding of psycho-social development require a historically-specific supplement that speaks to the historical subject-condition of contemporary metropolitan adolescents. This is because the psychoanalytic tradition addresses the question of quality in terms of personhood, the major fault lines of psycho-social reality, and the toll (or compromise) of socialization and nothing more.

technology) to motivate the person into cultivating consumption-friendly presence in the world. How do we hold onto a theory of human liberation faced with this complex of subjugation? How is it still possible for the unanticipated overflow of surplus to find a way out? The answer might be on the structural and material grounds of contemporary youth studies, where a serious acknowledgment of the advent of consumer-socialization seems to be forestalled by a market-friendliness of dominant ideological limitations, which normalize commercial technology to secure exploitation and surplus extraction. It is in such a climate that social control can readily masquerade as banal reality, foregoing critical questions about the historically-concrete quality of younger generations’ object relations as a marker of how political selfawareness is shaped.15 As Aichhorn pointed out, psychological theory is, by its clinical nature, fixated on the preservation of historical intergenerational and interpersonal (historically-specific) values.16 This is why youth studies has tended to misrecognize structural identity as the definitive developmental identity, and view adolescents already as the offspring, clients, or patients in need of correction. It is precisely why the reality of psychotechnology can serve as the historical bridge between psychic value theory and psychic labor theory. With the case of metropolitan adolescents, theory can provide the much needed mobilizing spirit to politicize the everyday experience of consumer capitalism. The psycho-social critique needs to be paired with political ideals, autonomy and self-determination, to force an attentiveness to the historical substance, the concreteness (or materiality) of psycho-social experience—or at least, what seems to be the formative psychosocial dynamics enveloping it.

16. Aichhorn (1935).

224

The Loot Loop

Chapter Six

225

In mediated gadgetized relations, we can pinpoint this kind of concreteness of ideology. At the precipice of psychoanalysis and ideology, psycho-technology focuses on the consumerist-extractive intent of contemporary consumer economy in the form of technology-enabled, micro-management of ideas, but more importantly that of managing the concrete quality of experience. The theory of psycho-technology points to techniques that regulate the qualitative experience as a person uses consumer technology for social and economic mediation. Because it affects the attention processes in the structural dimension of the psyche, what is put into question is the qualitative impact of psycho-pharmacological and attention-micro-management processes of being ‘plugged-in.’ In other words, psycho-technology intimates the potential for a framework to approach the psycho-social, already the grounds of socialization and social-reproductive processes, which have arguably been beyond the extractive grasp of capitalism until this point. Furthermore, the prevalence of such an experience in regard to subject-gadget and subject-avatar relations signals the arrival of a new paradigm of labor with new terms of surplus-extraction. A libidinal-economic narrative of the historical-material human condition— and not an easily universalizable general condition— can enable immanent critique of capitalist society from its own vestiges. Psycho-social activity, that is, desire (or the relating in object-relations), becomes the source of production as the psycho-social flows are directed towards extraction prior to finding their way into consciousness or material representations. Considering what kind of surplus value interpellative extraction siphons will not only clarify the ways in which metropolitan adolescent consumer subjectivity is affectively governed, but also point towards the ways of grasping the essential terms of liberating psycho-politics.

Theories of Adolescence As I have argued earlier, theories of socialization appear to be beyond the realm of immediately-accessible politics, because they are theories of how human development is genealogically (that is, trans-generationally and historically) complimented by a reproductive (libidinal, object-relational) economy. Generationality becomes the presumed state of nature when reproduction is presumed to overshadow what is happening within. Observed relationally and materially, the reality is that personalities, those bedrocks of culture, are molded by social relations, which in themselves are also reproduced in the subjective processes of habituation and conception. Such differentiation across generations also goes by the name of socialization, the process which looks more like a technology, a structural means of reproduction than a natural, seemingly causal event. The adolescent subjects are generally defined as between birth and adulthood, as resting in this liminal gulf between two definite temporal signs. The authoritative forces under which young people’s subjectformation unfolds are naturalized and de-temporalized (as long as these forces are ideologically “good enough”). As such, adolescence definitionally refers to prior-toadulthood: it is a temporal designation. In fact, this prior always returns as the rationale for why the adult world must correct, protect, direct, educate, or heal youth away from their presence. Their speech is regulated; they are considered inept, confused, underdeveloped, self-destructively narcissistic, impulsive, and melodramatic, unable to even conceive of themselves without the help of adult self-reflection. But even in the face of the most righteous proclamation about adolescent subjects’ ineptness, the possibility of their own politics survives in the political economic impositions on them as metropolitan adolescents.

226

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

227

The opportunities for a young subject to be recognized on his own terms are scarce. Either he speaks in the language provided to him by adults or he is reduced to a quotient. Adolescent politicality is pre-formed, because the popular political discourse recognizes only voices reflecting the established (race, class, and gender specific) adult values and structures. The question is not merely of access to language (that is, who has a right to speak), but how language itself corresponds with certain subject-experiences and narratives, and not others. A subject who intends to communicate must do so within a symbolic system already bound to a certain social order; a subject who wishes his subjectivity confirmed must narrate himself appropriately according to specific historic and cultural patterns. Thus self-understanding comes to be enveloped in ideology. Even when theorists have recognized the historical nature of subjectivity, adolescence has been viewed as a time when false (ideological and class) self-consciousness is established by an authoritarian force and reproduced by the self. In instances in which the constrained nature of young people’s lives offers a case study in political-economic reproduction, theory has been limited by developmental, ahistorical presumption so much so that the ‘formative’ aspects of youth subject-sociality were merely treated as pieces of the yet-to-be-fully-formed complex that is the ‘subject.’ As Lyotard argued, scripts through which we come to communicate with others are pre-formed for subjects; the adolescent subject is always-already defined by markers imprinted on his body, language, and thinking.17 The study of youth undertaken by adults has been prone to underwriting ideological reproduction. Blind to qualitative generational difference, it has presumed the sanctity of structural stability and developmental continuity as young people always become adults. In any

228

The Loot Loop

17. Lyotard (1988). Further, studies on adolescent lives have tended to forgo a political critique of the given social circumstances in an effort to preserve social-scientific objectivity. Ethnographies of young people’s social experience of class, race, and gender have documented the impact of these historical-structuring external forces in young people’s lives. For example, Willis (1981) gives us ideological development of the white-maleworking-class. And, McRobbie (1981) provides us with the precarious position of whitefemale-working-class youth, who find solace in identifying with gendered culture and social reproduction through transgenerational ideologies of domesticity and femininity. But, besides the traditional containers, the dominant ideology reigning over youth studies has preferred an a-historical mode of analysis as if the fate of youth was always already sealed—perhaps because the category of youth has tended to be a tool in authors’ own existential confirmations. For Willis and McRobbie, class is ultimately the predictor; for Aichhorn and Freud, it is the historical definition of delinquency and behavioral patterns in family culture; for Erikson, it is the establishment of idealization over ambivalent feelings towards the primary socializing parental authority figure. And Kristeva uses the term “ideality” as a developmental marker of adolescence, arguing that the primary psychological identifier of an adolescent is his belief in the absolute.

case, adolescence appears as a time in which ideology is implanted, and becomes unshakable. Adolescents-aspolitical-subjects are therefore rendered impossible, for adolescence is nothing but a time of complete and seamless ideological conformity. Nonetheless, academic works theorizing youth and youth culture must stay present to the difference between the capitalist system that must continually produce subjugation (in this case, adolescences), and actual adolescence, which is a subject position that exists concretely and on its own, interacting with, but distinct from the structural conditions which situate and produce it as an effect. The trouble is not merely with the blatant commodification of younger generations’ material worlds. The problem is with the means and effect of the psycho-social processes imposed on the socialization of the young. The consumer political economy fosters a peculiar kind of emotional position in the adolescent. Dissent and frustration at the sight of fixity make metropolitan adolescents feel inadequate, abnormal, and eventually even existentially depressed and apolitical, but with a reminder that a transitory self-satisfaction can always be found in consumption. This dissent is also the grounds of politically formative alienation. Today, as the numbers of youth dropping out and succumbing to the failed attempts at the Great Refusal rise, the adolescents across the metropoles perform their response to the psycho-political condition of their socialization: the only way to fulfillment is to refuse to give heed to the inner voice that does not obey the rules of the repressive order. Politics of Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination Commodification implies exploitation, and in the realm of psycho-politics, the unequal exchange of con-

Chapter Six

229

sciousness for ideology. It is not merely thingification or objectification. It is a concrete historical occurrence, and therefore, a basic factor determining political empowerment. Somewhere by implication we should be able to begin to see a new direction for youth rights and substantive youth politics. It is a matter of how we conceptualize the relationship between society and youth as the newcomer, the radical by nature, the unhabituated, the still-yet, the unaccustomed, the unprepared, the unexpecting, the surprisable consciousness. I have tried to offer a thought experiment capable of politically positioning the question of how hospitable the society is towards its youth, or more critically put, how youth are treated in the very centers of the global capital, and what of theirs is explained away in such a way as to justify unconsciousness, subjugation, and sacrifice. What happens to youth in the process of socialization, especially its primary (childhood and adolescent) stages, is a perpetually proto-political occurrence, a formative treatment that decides a person’s futurity. Sure, as in the past, we could still dismiss the pains of primary socialization as an inevitable cost. When the process becomes so invested with the needs of the reigning political economy that the imaginary must be increasingly prefigured in the reproduction of the system, then the cost of that process is no longer just tragic. Critical youth studies, which contemporarily is still mainly an amalgamation of disciplinary niches, has the potential to pose a political challenge to disciplinary, compartmentalized studies of the human condition; it can take into account the mutually-constituting, dialectical relationship between structure and subject. I have worked to describe the problem in the most consequential and extensive terms against either theory that self-idolizes (and thus loses sight of its politics) or social research that pretends it is not political in what seems to be paralleling self-interest. There

is already too much unprocessed, fragmented understanding about our condition. Illustrated by our reinterpretation of adolescent addiction to gaming (in terms of its effects on psycho-social development, and by extension the formation of consciousness and politics of self and desire), a mere perspectival shift can turn the existing research into means to demystify the consequences of this particular kind of object-relational or meta-psychological commodification. Any such treatment would result in the substantiation of what the "war of youth” really means. My intention has been to set up a conceptual framework that can handle: the question of political subjectivity, the prospect or the possibility of political self-consciousness, and the critique of industry and ideology in the contexts of subjects and gaming. In order to see the structures more clearly, it has been imperative to specify the subject across multiple institutionalized dimensions of positionality—to think about the political economic life of a person on the home base (that is, on the interior of the globalized consumer economy), and situate the qualitative experience of a typical person who resides within the walls of the empire to then immerse into gaming as adolescent avatar-subject. In the contemporary political economy of the metropolis, the adolescent embodies the markers of the reigning mode of production—his sense of self is caught in a psycho-social machinery that supplies the larger economy with new value and much-needed ideological stability. He is a consumer, whose ability to produce value is publicly denied precisely because (in gadgetized mediation) it is increasingly the most reliable source of profitability; he is a self-conscious subject who suffers from the maladies of commodity life, yet he is disciplined by the culture to think himself alone in this suffering and calm himself accordingly. The very process of subject-formation for the metropolitan adolescent is

230

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

231

laden with immediate political economic consequence— it is through his identity construction that the social structures are confirmed and reproduced. Discourse dehistoricizes the adolescent, therefore the path to a more ethical clearing lies behind insisting on historical situatedness. An adolescent is a specific, existing subject—a human being with a historically-situated consciousness and relation with other subjects in the social structure. This social category functions to structurally locate this person in relation to social reproduction (as well as in dialectically contradictory manners). In that structural groundedness, his self-consciousness is contingent on the historical materiality. His capacity for self-actualization and self-awareness develop out of (and during) his experiences of socialization. As such, the status of the adolescent subject is paradigmatic of the relation between agency and subjugation at the heart of modern Western subjectivity (more so perhaps because of his social, political, and economic dependence on adults). Therefore, I offer adolescence as a class position, in the sense that Marx conceptualizes the proletariat, because it is the specific and historically-determined structural position of the adolescent which enables his unique experience of the tension inherent in bourgeois subjectivity under advanced capitalism. Adolescence as Class in the Age of Ouroboric Capitalism What is genuinely political when we actively recognize adolescents on their own terms? That is, how do we approach thinking critically about the adolescent person as he lives in this historical moment considering the historical psycho-social as well as the political-economic terms of his subjectivity? Re-reading Kristeva, what is happening in metropolitan adolescent culture nowadays is a

reversal of the “ideality syndrome,” which in retrospect looks more like a protest, an attempt to hold on to the emotional trauma of the real objects of human investment.18 The possibility of adolescent politics, even if only the mere fact that the adolescents protest commodification with bouts of “ideality,” requires that we focus on opening spaces beyond ideology for possible utterance. In order to come to a place of such possibility, we have to begin from allegiance with youth and their existential status. This is much more complicated than a statement on being pro-youth, because it requires recognizing adolescence as a class position; to politicize socialization and developmental theories, consumer adolescents need to be seen as a class. My conception of adolescence as class is indebted to Marx’s concept of class in German Ideology.19 In the opening of his book, Marx evokes that the beginnings of the social constitution of division of labor originate within the family, where the children and the wife are slaves to the husband. There is a dormant critique of socialization as a political constitutive process in this proposition as Marx bases his argument on the nature of property relations as originating from such familial alienation.20 Following this logic to its conclusion, and sharpening it with the anti-socially-reproductive arguments of Laing, Cooper, Deleuze, and others, adolescence as class offers a timely critique of the banality of reproduction under consumer capitalism.21 It might appear unfitting to apply a notion of class to a group tied only by their age (or more so the amount of time they have spent in the world). But, Marx found the proletariat to be a class that at the time of his conception critiqued the fundamental principles of the capitalist mode of (re)production because of the very nature of their social positionality. He recognized the inherent subjugation of the human that happens in

232

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

18. Kristeva (2007). 19. Marx (1967). 20. Marx pp. 22, 46. 21. Ibid p. 42. I would also like to point out that in Marx’s critique of labor, there is also a sign of a broader critique of political economy that harkens to the way I would like to use adolescence as class to mean a negation of the regime of work, and to refer to workas-play under postindustrial capitalism. Through this qualification, this analytic project concerning the everyday immaterial labor of postindustrial metropolitan adolescents adheres to the political argument in Marx’s theory of labor— that is, labor is “power over individuals,” “as the subjection of the individual which makes a man into a restricted town-animal.”

233

the context of social reproduction, but chose to ground his analysis on the more immediately contestable territory—that of the concrete political economy. When Marx talks about the proletariat as a world-revolutionary class, there is an opening to considering how this applies to youth politics. In his words,

In his reasoning we can see the grounds for considering that adolescents, in their general and most broadly applicable human and social condition, embody the same potential for critiquing contemporary capitalist processes of commodification of what is qualitatively human. I use class in the sense that denotes the same social, cultural, and economic positionality of persons, who also share the same structural positions in terms of intergenerationality (their place in the cycle of social reproduction) and its complimentary cultural rationalizations of authority and subjugation. In this sense adolescence as class differs from prior definitions because of a psycho-social valiance—the common grooves across subject-positions critique the very subject-formation and everyday interpellation as decisive political processes. The maladies of adolescents of postindustrial capital make them a group that embodies the interests of all the other classes, but cannot fight for its procurement. This holds especially in the current era of digital entertainment technologies, which readily redirect any and all subjective means to social and self-recognition toward commodification. As Marx puts it, “the struggle

to be waged…aims at a more decided and radical negation of the previous conditions of society than could all previous classes which sought to rule."23 After all, adolescents are the major group whose subject position and life activity is commodified—as in the case of the commodification of play and fantasy as well as self-self and self-other relations. Additionally, in light of the infantilization of adults and the capitalist accounting for valorization and investment with nullifying ready-made ideologies, adolescents also represent the interests of all the other classes to critique the very mode of production. Their plight represents the internal move of capital to colonize interiority at certain historical limit of exploitation. Adolescents of postindustrial capitalism constitute a class, because capital has moved to take over the very live-activity that would have been the grounds for the alienated workers to recognize their alienation by commodification. Youth (that is, children and adolescents in any context of social reproductive necessity) are a proto-class in the principled Marxist sense of their subject position critiquing the whole of the capitalist system. Metropolitan adolescent class bears all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages. Ousted from society, they are forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; they are a class underpinning the majority of the members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution. Adolescence as class fits Marx’s description the moment we realize the immensity of the problem of transforming postindustrial capital: the investment and complicity of adult generations in the reproduction of dehumanizing commodification, and the conditioning of personality and political consciousness that inevitably occurs under the division of labor and social relationships. In light of these political and transgener-

234

Chapter Six

The contradiction between individuality of each separate proletarian and labour, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident to him himself, for he is sacrificed from youth upwards and, within his own class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class.22

The Loot Loop

22. Marx (1967) p. 78.

23. Marx p. 41.

235

ational issues, postindustrial youth are the only class that have no “particular class interest to assert against the ruling class” as their humanity stands in abject opposition to the so-called civilizing commodification and self-alienation requisite for the global capital. Adolescents have claim to the status of a class from the moment that the economy begins to squeeze surplus out of having subjugated them to its circuits of (re)production. In this recognition lies the opportunity to expose the possibility of a politics hiding beneath what passes for the dominant ideology of what is socially valuable. Adolescent politics necessitates a political conception of newness. Abject newcomers possess the potential for radical social critique having been excluded from the prior (in this case, by mere fact of not having yet been born). They are both the product, and the absolute negation (outside) of capitalism; both the rejection of the (liberal) politics of the amplification of the social as a corrective to exclusion. If adolescence is viewed as a class, and adolescent subject formation, alas the normalized structural processes effecting the everyday subject-economy, is seen as the domain of politics, then aspects of socialization can be effectively critiqued as political economic structures. There is a set of questions that arises when we consider adolescents as a class: what sort of a political economy encapsulates their experience? What are the ideological and material forms of this experience? And, where can we turn for the necessary political vocabulary to talk about what is going on here?

24. Adorno (2001) p. 366. 25. Ibid

subject-to-be. From the moment of birth, he will be subjugated, even to an idea of being a subject. But first it will begin with a shock, a familial childhood trauma caused (in the least) by the incommunicability of early childhood.24 We, too, shriek at the horrific possibility—that socialization is socialization always into a life of violence, but quickly naturalize it. Adorno, who contextualizes cultural transmission even as he upsets normative conceptions of development and civilization by reminding us of the power of intergenerationality and ideology, said it best: A child, friend of an innkeeper named Adam, watch-ed him club the rats pouring out of holes in the courtyard. It was in his image that the child made its own image of the first man. That this has been forgotten—that we no longer know what we used to feel before the dogcatcher’s van——is both the triumph of culture and its failure. Culture, which keeps emulating the old Adam, cannot bear to be reminded of that zone, and precisely this is not to be reconciled with the conception that culture has of itself. It abhors stench because it stinks— because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit.25

Psycho-politics and Responsibility There is a political dimension to the psycho-social study of youth, and it becomes visible in the authorial choices to define the subject (especially the idiosyncratic and ideological underpinnings of those choices). Under the guise of socialization, the child is valuable only as a

Considering adolescence as class immediately suggests that the very notion of responsibility ought to be troubled. In the ideological confines of theory, adolescents are often represented as innately desiring responsibility—that young subjects both crave and need the discipline for ‘caring for’ (oneself, an object, or someone else) in order to become autonomous, that is, themselves. But, to whom exactly is this obligation and responsibility owed? Responsibility is nothing more than a cover for psycho-social processes that bind young people to a so-

236

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

237

cial realm not of their choosing, which exact a penalty even as they liberate the young into the so-called realm of autonomous, adult responsibility. The manner in which responsibility is defined also carves out its limits—those subjects, thoughts, or politics to whom no responsibility is due, but who owe responsibility to the normative standards of the given social order. I think it might be useful to carefully rehabilitate responsibility, as that which is owed to and desired from young subjects in a dialectical relation which binds them to older generations. Social theory might need to rehabilitate the notion of responsibility as a discourse of intergenerationality and natality in the manner that (some) postcolonial theorists have rehabilitated the previouslyrejected modernist universals in their attempts to develop a relevant postcolonial politics—hence my insistence on the ideals of self-determination, autonomy, and self-consciousness. Social research on contemporary youth represents the consciousness of transgenerational problems that arise in consumer society, because neither the familial/cultural tradition nor the communal law explicitly considers the psychic economy in the young people’s lives. In refusing to own up to the responsibility, they ignore the psycho-social conditions and circumstances in consumer society that warrant regulation— in terms of market-oriented aesthetic and libidinally-connected introductions, guided identifications, introjections and the like. In a good enough society, natality refreshes the circularity of social reproduction. In Arendt’s words, “the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers” presents the opportunity of “beginning something anew, that is, of acting.”26 The healthy society is supposed to be hospitable and tolerant to the newcomers. But, when society-wide fragmentation and commodification become the norm, that society loses

238

The Loot Loop

26. Arendt (1958) p. 9.

its credibility as it ceases to be good enough. Under consumer capitalism, the systemically necessary bouts of primitive accumulation reinvent the structural capacity for decoupling, deterritorializing, and fragmentation, and as such, prove the inability of the law of the family and culture to substantively offset the toll of the deceit in becoming a consumer subject. Youth are left largely defenseless as their parents (and their grandparents) become preoccupied with the repetition of what they experienced during the years of their own political-economically-situated development, and how that experience has influenced their reading of the world dialectically. Therefore, they are virtually alone. Adolescents end up being raised by the consumer economy, whose agents are developing ways of controlling the flow of psychic surplus to conditionally socialize them by the most up-to-date schemas of repressive desublimation, that is, administered secondary narcissism, utilizing the young person’s propensity to believe in the promise of repression without ever delivering that self-satisfaction or lasting empowerment. It is at this juncture that politics of metropolitan adolescence, where adolescence is conceived as a class that desires self-determination, poses a direct challenge to the historical conditions of human subjectivity, because, as politics of liberation qua youth, it addresses the young human before (but also on the way) to adulthood and its eventual incorporation and inevitable complicity. Such a theory requires a foundation, which emerges when we unpack the relation between young subjectivity and history. In the relation between a young subject and history the question regards the power of the young subject to negotiate historicity and materiality. Implied in the question of power is a principle of self-consciousness, a claim to determine one’s own being in the world over one’s lifespan in the face of the imposed

Chapter Six

239

material and ideational limits. Like a litmus test, selfconsciousness is politicized by an ideal of self-determination. In the context of politics of self-awareness and commodification under consumer capitalism, consciousness is trivialized—autonomy and consciousness easily become undesirable. An all-normalizing gust of ideology (of normality and banal accumulation) then fills the deliberated vacuum of awareness without ever bringing to the fore the politics of redirecting culturally reproduced neurosis into continually expanding chains of commodification. After all, we are born at the mercy of people who have lived (just) long enough to carve out a space in the political-economy for themselves (and often at the expense of their youthful, other-worldly desires). In our contemporary moment, the political-economy that encapsulates this genealogy is deeply structured by global capitalism, whose brutality lies in its desire to perpetuate a fantasy of its own totality. This is a time of highly structured social- and self-engagement, in which the organized society requires the sterilization of uncontrollable life to function. The reigning ideological logic assumes the universality of the longview (the end of history) and prioritizes the institutionalized life, the perseverance of society, and the political economic chains of adulthood in the form of property, predictability, and stability. In this context, what is political for adolescents amounts to a complete rejection of their futurity on the grounds of their newness, because all phantasies of empowerment which rely upon the current ideology doom the adolescents to a future not of their own making. As Marx put it, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”27 Emancipation and genuine empowerment are always constrained by hidden (and necessary) domination. But, equally, we cannot theorize the political em-

240

The Loot Loop

27. Marx (1976) p. 37.

28. Marcuse (1972) p. 48.

powerment of a person in society through a rationale based on universal general knowledge of the subject’s psychical makeup. As a critique of domination-rationality, the psychopolitical framework outlined in this book is an attempt to begin a counter-discourse. Even in the most critical way, the dominant theoretical discourses on child subjectivity speak about the child-subject in a dissecting manner, where the psychical world of the child is laid out in front of the theorist as if it were an a priori at the precise points where the child is most commodifiable, behaviorized, and thus manipulatable, and by extension, not wholly human. Politics of youth stems from a final acceptance of liberation as a politico-ethical law. Marcuse said it best: To give freedom by freedom is the universal law Freedom must give way to more freedom, the only rightful repression is one that enables freedom from blossoming in its heterodox, multivalent, non-identical and unexpected ways.28 A serious consideration of the prerequisites for the psychical empowerment of a young subject requires that we look at the way in which the society interestedly engages with and takes advantage of his development, his attempts to understand the world and live within it. Seen from the outside, this is the domain of his rightful self-consciousness. As an orienting concept, self-consciousness should allow us to theorize the notion of the adolescent-subject without falling into the conceptual trap of speaking without giving the subject the sense of his ownness necessary to any post-domination political discourse—not in the sense of property, but in the sense of benefitting from the industrialization of psychic relations.

Chapter Six

241

If we refuse the inquisitive framework that rationalizes the socially-reproductive violence without critical engagement, we are faced with the fact that the adolescent psyche is not a terrain that we can understand, that we have access into. But, this does not mean that there is nothing to do, and that deindustrial abstention is the only ethical solution. In the purpose of the inquiry we can rediscover a new directive. If the project is not one of domination but liberation, then the concepts through which we elaborate on our political and ethical convictions (about the treatment of the Other) will be framed within that responsibility. The term I have relied on for this purpose is self-consciousness29: a sign for a dialectic process between the growing subject and the world, a way of symbolizing, a placeholder for the person’s narrative of meaning-making. Self-consciousness is meant to avoid falling into the trap of prefiguring the psychical makeup of a young (developing) subject that in its descriptiveness hides its constructions. Viewed strictly on the level of process, and never a matter of content, the appropriate concerns are critically limited to the notions of space, continuity, source of affectation, social-dictate, historical and material disruption, de-habituation, and (un)socializing disillusionment. In this way, we can theorize the impact of intergenerational dynamics on the child-subject without having to pretend to dissect its insides. Self-Consciousness as the Development of Private Language Conventionally speaking, self-consciousness embodies the limits of potential self-empowerment as the desire for exploration outside of the primary social relations becomes fused with the emotionally imprinted terms of relation. In terms of psychoanalytic object relations theory, self-consciousness captures the libidinal structure

242

The Loot Loop

29. In earlier works, I thought of this notion as having access to and capacity for authorship in one’s own private language narrative.

in the relationships formed with internalized objects, relationships which secure the survival of personal historical meanings by preserving the emotional imprint of a given relationality to an object of attachment. This is an act of social compromise in which the trauma of early childhood socialization is soothed by that of relational preservation. Surviving the mechanism of sublimation in which the original object of the nurturer is repressed while the desire itself is preserved, the phantasy-imprinted self-consciousness becomes an expression of the meaning of that specific relationality. Clearly there are at least two types of self-consciousness languages: an actual, progressively expanding capacity to symbolize objects and fragments of objects within a specific social and cultural matrix, and a second, a sensuous register, a way that the emotional universe registers and conducts relations with objects and fragments. This distinction is important, because consumer capitalism governs dually through the sensuous (or the affective) as well as the ideological (or the symbolic) regimes. Structurally, the way in which this principal relationality is established hypostatizes the desires that have been allowed to find expression within the matrixes of rules and priorities of culture. Those matrices—the rules of engagement, negotiation, and satisfaction—are stable as long as there are not too many disjunctions between the culturally-regulated dictations for selfconsciousness (or private language development) and the common experiences of the emotional everyday life. Adorno offers a fitting point: To those who have had the undeserved good fortune to not be completely adjusted in their inner intellectual composition to the prevailing norms– –a stroke of luck, which they often enough have to pay for in terms of their relationship to the immediate environment––it is incumbent to make the

Chapter Six

243

moralistic and, as it were, representative effort to express what the majority, for whom they say it, are not capable of seeing or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see.30 In other words, self-consciousness can risk reproduction, because it disturbs the limits of such experience and upsets the balance between the individually-internal and the outside-social status-quo stability. This kind of self-consciousness has its alliance with the libidinal, the drive and instinctual underpinnings of the child’s own conception of selfhood (that is, the Id). As in psychoanalytic theory, the conscious or the rational aspect of the psyche (the Ego) actually serves the purpose of socializing the private as it filters and forces the self to either abandon its self-consciousness completely or to find ways to augment, substitute, or translate its meanings. But, Freud’s treatment of the Id is at best incomplete. Instead of the Ego ascending to the primacy of subjectivity—as the entity in the psyche that knows “I,” and hence prepares the person for identificatory incorporation, it is the libidinally-based aspect of the psyche which appears as the kernel of selfhood. Adorno offers another complimentary thought: preserving the subjectivity of the psychical through private language formations of self-consciousness, giving it a something, “the indissolubly ontic as the something”: No being without existents. The Something as the necessary substrate of the concept in thinking, also that of being, is the utmost abstraction—— not to be abolished by any further thought-process—of what is substantive, which is not identical with thought; without the Something, formal logic cannot be thought…Constitutive to what is substantive for the form is above all the substan-

244

The Loot Loop

30. Adorno (2001) p. 51.

31. Adorno (2001) p. 139.

tial experience of what is substantive. Correlatively, the pure concept, the function of thought, is not to be radically separated at the subjective counter-pole from the existent “I”31...... . Since it has its self-consciousness, what is signified by the Id is really aboriginal desire, which also has its structures, its order, and therefore is not simply a volatile substance of interiority that must be dominated. Looking at development in this manner provides a path of conceptually reclaiming the child’s original (Id-based) subjectivity from its political pejoratives—the primitive or asocial (or even anti-social) taint traditionally assigned to it to justify institutional mistreatment and abuse. See the apparatus from the perspective of the adolescent-subject. Imaginary social intrusion, meant to socialize him into the economies, is affective, emotional, libidinal, and aesthetic; it is qualitative, experiential. Society totalizes itself inside his mind through complexes of socialization and familial emotional indoctrination. The process creates a certain economic harmony between existing psychodynamic currents and the agency of the newcomer. As in the colonial situation, the adolescent’s language (for the lack of a better term for the substance of a relation), by which he conceives of his imaginary objects, comes to be dominated by external definitions. In gaming, we have observed how multifarious this language can become. For psycho-political schemas, it is this language, which defines the outline of the political in the libido-cognitive life. And, if we do accept the call to political conceptualization of the psyche, then we need psychopolitical concepts that will decisively speak to the agency of the adolescent-subject.

Chapter Six

245

Considered as a historical object, the quality of selfconsciousness embodies the structural evidence of the politically-intentioned social formation of the young psyche. It captures the cultural and familial imprint in the principles of relationality that the child forms not only with future external objects but also its savored internal ones, as processes of socialization and socio-cultural indoctrination. It is a private establishment of relations: a psychical bridge between emotional relationality and the iconoclastic symbols of the culturally formatted unconscious. In terms of psychic surplus, connections between culturally-validated symbolizations and the fragments of imaginative cognitions allow the subject to be functional in the social realm, relegating the surplus (or the spill-over) beyond the available concepts and categories to the realm of culture. Most of the time, this is merely folklore and kitsch, but this point goes far in elaborating the consequences of psychodynamic changes brought about by the experience and the perspective of different generations. The way that any preceding generation nurtures its descendants is always already bound up with the socio-historical and cultural lexicon that is partly made up of its own inheritance and the history of its existential education. Thus this lexicon prepares the young for acknowledgment and fitting into the establishment, but not necessarily the heterodox affect of new historical experiences. As Adorno pointed out, Yet even in the most extreme efforts to express the history congealed in the things in language, the words used for this remain concepts. Their precision is a surrogate of the selfness of the thing, never wholly present; a gap yawns between it and what it wants to conjure...The determinate failure of all concepts necessitates the citation of oth-

246

The Loot Loop

32. Adorno (2001) p. 62.

ers; therein originate those constellations, into which alone something of the hope of the Name has passed...What it criticizes in words, its claim to immediate truth, is almost always the ideology of the positive, existing identity of the word and the thing. Even the insistence on the specific word and concept, as the iron gate to be unlocked, is solely a moment of such, though an indispensable one. In order to be cognized, that which is internalized, which the cognition clings to in the expression, always needs something external to it.32 Every time a parental figure asserts dominance over the elements of the stories that give the newcomer greater insight into the workings of the world, whether this dominance is exclaimed through physical and psychological coercion or simply out of exercising domination over language and ideology, his ability to explore the emotional weight and the corresponding language (even if it is entirely invented) diminishes. In this sense, the imaginary institution of society means the social order’s domination. In the post-industrial age, it denotes the regulation and repressive desublimation of selfconsciousness through commodification of the flows of psychic surplus, especially since the social handlers of youth have resigned themselves to upholding their own fantasy of continued authority. To question the specter of language and symbolization would be a good start, for it is increasingly detrimental to presume the political value of the readily communicable. Self-consciousness is a psycho-political dynamic within the subject. It is a primary communicative device for the subject and his own inner objects. The youth’s inner language connotes not a linguistic parallel to psychic objects, but a multi-dimensional relation and feel of relationality to an object of desire. In contrast, language incorporates the young into the fold.

Chapter Six

247

A psycho-political consideration of what is shared and exchanged between the public and the private from birth should bring us to a radical political realization that self-consciousness—even the narrative of one’s understanding of one’s own subjectivity—is inherently political. The terms of their formation directly influence the possibilities of empowerment, or what should be further specified as qualitative liberation, that is, sensuousness and imagination dictating the terms of self-awareness and self-reflexivity—and not economic exploitation or even reproductive consideration. On the spectrum of relations between youth and power, self-determination is the measure as well as the ideal end point. By defining the geometric parameters of young subjects’ relation to existential, political consciousness, we beget a guiding principle outside the dominant ideological understanding of sociality (and thus outside the pressures of social reproduction and indoctrination). We can have clarity on young subjectivity and the nature (and politics and ethics) of its relation to exploitation and domination in historically contingent society. This is a perspective on intergenerational political responsibility. We can ask whether or not something benefits the young subject, not in the sense of becoming healthy or productive, which are categories that serve ideologically conceived sociality and the interest of something external to the subject, but in the sense of empowering the subject to do what he will with his own body, self, and existence—to realize his own multidimensional material liberation. Without the dramatic effect of economic exploitation on the psycho-politics of self-consciousness, the young could ideally make sense of the world in alternatively imagined relations. For one, the existing psycho-technologies could become the means for radical self-cultivation, if only their psycho-social

apparatus was made conscionable. This is precisely what I mean by emancipation of self-consciousness. Unlike his parents who were socialized smoothly in an ideologically stable time, adolescence marks the last chance to no refuse external definitions and meanings for his private imaginary objects. But, this effort would require its own structures, since the adolescent must be capable of sustaining responsibility for his self-consciousness. I think that the critical, psycho-political directive makes sense ultimately in terms of liberation of youth from the conditions of unconscious identification and self-objectification. The directive should be pointed towards consciousness and self-determination despite what that might mean for the rest of the society. Taking that risk is the only way to circumvent our present predicament. This aspect of my conclusion has been hard for many to stomach, especially because it suggests that the only ethical political action on the part of the adult world already complicit to consumerization would be self-sacrifice. In the end, I hope in the least that I was able to push against the boundaries of existing theories of libidinal economies to show that what is still lacking is a politics of socialization—social reproduction, subject-formation, self-consciousness.

248

Chapter Six

The Loot Loop

The Predicament of Consumer Adolescents Even though developmentally ideology limits their selfconception, adolescents are dominated to accept the secondary options in place of their primary desires as relational objects indoctrinate newly formed subjectivities towards interjection and capture of their libidinal development. This is why we must face the way that the libidinal economies of contemporary metropolitan adolescence involve the socio-historical consideration of the 1980s and 1970s when the con-

249

sumer society began to prepare the population for the digital consumer marketization—born at the same time as financial capital and new deregulated markets.33 The new performance principle of how to function in modern society rushed to fill the vacuum left by the dislocation of the transitional reality principle produced by economic exploitation of parental laboring habits. After all Western children’s consumer culture and the universe of commodities are inherently linked at this historical occurrence: the prototypical psycho-social preparation of the new generation for secondary-narcissistic consumption most readily observable in the contemporary lives of the so-called millennials. In the absence of a public discourse to address private knowledge about the inconsequentiality of subjectobject correspondence, alienation becomes a quotidian experience across the board. The widespread apathy, loneliness, and political defeatism in youth culture today no doubt stem from profound dissatisfaction with the reigning terms of sublimation. To the older generation that must now adapt to the reign of this kind of economic exploitation, secondary narcissistic consumer socialization does not have the same effect as it does on the youngest populations of the West. Hence, why the social corrective to the consumer economy should not be left to the whims of the adult generations. Even though adolescents seldom find the language to articulate their private convictions motivated by their sensuous recognition of their own flows of psychic surplus, they can only express that their humanity is being reduced. Unfortunately, given the conservative theoretical parameters through which we view adolescents, their clarity and resilience gained through painful tribulations are dismissed as counter-productive and ultimately unimportant regressions in the course of their development towards an idealized notion of in-

250

The Loot Loop

33. Reading texts belonging to the cultural studies movement enabled me to extract snapshots of instances in which consumer culture met youth engagement. Particularly the works of Willis (1979) and McRobbie (2000) were particularly useful for their subjectspecificity.

consequential maturity. Therefore, it is critical to return to the realization that the momentum of commodification stems from a borrowed instinct, a desire to reproduce the model of authority that parents and older generations represent. After all, the way that social reproduction utilizes psychic surplus is meant to guarantee a process of conditioning youth, carrying over the surplus of their imaginative (desiring) inner processes into ever more expanding socially-interconnected ones. Under a different historical-material, societal reign over young subjectivity, the sociality of human desire could be nurtured to grow in ways that are radically different than the situation in which adolescents find themselves at this juncture. In other words, the antisociality or at least the asociality of desire that this statement implies is strictly grounded in the already convinced, conservative reading of the situation. The result of this process is a certain internalization of the common cultural experience of growing up in the world, which, although it captures the young subject by denying him the authority to direct his internal remainders, also evicts the political nature of the experiences of his predecessors in the eyes of the young. To put it differently, when the whole process is captured by consumer society, as is increasingly the case in the age of gadgetized interpellative mediation, there is no longer a guarantee of the perpetual intergenerational compromise in qualitative experience as everyone begets their own version of psychic-surplus fueled private self-constitution at the expense of realizing the sacrifice that they have been subjected to. The contemporary consumer society now appropriates a created situation in which youth cannot find any ideals that would justify anything besides buying-in. In this way, the authority never softens for the already-psycho-socially marginalized adolescents; in turn the adolescents do not even be-

Chapter Six

251

come the compassionate witnesses to the hardening of the older generations. Instead they become stillborn for the sake of preserving capitalistically integrated object relations—they are de facto relegated to seeking solace for their disgruntled consciousness in consumer objects.

252

The Loot Loop

The Loot Loop

253

Bibliography Activision. (2008). Call of Duty: World at War. Xbox 360 Platinum Hits edition. Mod. “Nazi Zombies.” Adorno, T. W. (1983). Minima moralia; reflections from damaged life. London : New Left Books. Adorno, T. W. (1998). Critical models : interventions and catchwords. New York : Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. W. & Ashton, E. B. (2001). Negative Dialectics. London : New Left Books. Aichhorn, A. (1935). Wayward youth. New York, Viking Press. Althusser, L., & F. Matheron. (2003). The humanist controversy and other writings (1966-67). Verso. Print. Althusser, L. & Brewster, B. (1969). For Marx. London, Allen Lane. Althusser, L. & Brewster, B. (1970). Essays on ideology. London, Verso. Althusser, L., Corpet, O., & Matheron, F. (1996). Writings on psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan. New York: Columbia University Press. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Avalanche Software. (2013). Disney infinity. Xbox 360 edition. Disney interactive studios. Avedon, E. M., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1971). The study of games. New York: J. Wiley. Bainbridge, W. S. (2010). The Warcraft civilization: Social science in a virtual world. The MIT Press. Barber, B. R. (2008). Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens whole. New York: W. W. Norton. Baudrillard, J. & Turner, C. (1998). The consumer society: myths and structures. London; Thousand Oaks, Sage. Baudrillard, J. & Turner, C. (2005). The intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact. Oxford: BERG. Baudrillard, J. & Burk, D. (2011). Telemorphosis. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal.

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, UK : Polity.

Carlsson, U. (2010). Children and youth in the digital media culture: From a Nordic horizon. Göteborg, Sweden: International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media, NORDICOM, University of Gothenburg.

Beauvoir, S. d. & Borde, C. (1971). The second sex. New York, Knopf. Carroll, M. (1999). "Cyberseduction: Reality in the age of psychotechnology." The booklist 96(1): 34-34. Beller, J. (2006). The cinematic mode of production: Attention economy and the society of the spectacle. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.

Castoriadis, C., & Blamey, K. (1987). The imaginary institution of society. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Betancourt, M. (2010). “Immaterial value and scarcity in digital capitalism.” In Theory beyond the codes, eds. A. and M. Kroker. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=652

Castronova, E. (2006). Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games. Chicago [etc.: University of Chicago Press.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London ; New York, Routledge.

Castronova, E. (2007). Exodus to the virtual world: How online fun is changing reality. Palgrave Macmillan.

Bion, W. R. (1963). Learning from experience. New York,, Basic Books Pub. Co.

Clough, P. T. (2013). "(De)Coding the subject-in-affect." Subjectivity 23.1 (2008): 140-55. Print.

Bion, W. R. (1967). Second thoughts: selected papers on psycho-analysis. London, Heinemann Medical.

Cohen, J., and E. Schmidt. (2013). The new digital age: Reshaping the future of people, nations and business. Hachette UK.

Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and interpretation: a scientific approach to insight in psycho-analysis and groups. London,, Tavistock Publications. Bion, W. R. and F. Bion (1992). Cogitations. London, Karnac Books.

Cooper, D. G. (1971). The death of the family. New York, Pantheon Books. Corneliussen, H., and J. W. Rettberg, eds. (2008). Digital culture, play, and identity: A World of Warcraft reader. MIT Press.

Bissell, T. (2011). Extra lives: Why video games matter. New York: Vintage Books. Boellstorff, T. (2010). Coming of age in second life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, N.J. ;Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Boellstroff, T., & Nardi, B. A. (2012). Ethnography and virtual worlds: A handbook of method. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cote, M. and J. Pybus. (2007). “Learning to immaterial labor 2.0: Myspace and social networks.” Ephemera, 7(1), 88-106. Cote, M. and J. Pybus. (2010). “Learning to immaterial labor 2.0: Facebook and social networks.” In Peters, A. M. and E. Bulut (Eds.). Cognitive capitalism, education, and digital labor. New York : Peter Lang. pp. 169-193. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1992). Flow: the psychology of happiness. MIT Press.

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bogost, I. (2011). How to do things with videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Boyd, D. (2014). It's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press. Boyd, D. (2006). “Identity production in a networked culture: Why youth heart Myspace.” American association for the advancement of science. Retrieved from http://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html. Bradford, S. (2012). Sociology, youth and youth work practice (Working with young people: theoretical perspectives). Palgrave Macmillan. Brenner, N., and N. Theodore. (2002). Spaces of neoliberalism: urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Vol. 4: Blackwell Publishing. Print. Brown, B. (1996). The material unconscious: American amusement, Stephen Crane & the economies of play. Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble : feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, Routledge.

Cvijanovic, V., C. Vercellone, et al. (2010). Cognitive capitalism and its reflections in South-Eastern Europe. Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang. Deleuze, G. & Massumi, B. (1995). “Postscript on society of control.” In Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari & Massumi, B. (1986). Nomadology: the war machine. New York, NY, USA, Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and F. l. Guattari & Massumi, B. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Denegri-Knott, J., and M. Molesworth. (2013). "Redistributed consumer desire in digital virtual worlds of consumption." Journal of marketing management 29.13-14: 1561-79. Print. Derrida, J., & Weber, E. (1995). Points: Interviews. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dicks, B., B. Mason, A. Coffey, and P. Atkinson. (2005). Qualitative research and hypermedia: ethnography for the digital age. London : Sage Publications.

Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caraway, B. (2011). "Audience labor in the new media environment: A Marxian revisiting of the audience commodity." Media, Culture & Society 33(5): 693.

Dovey, J., and H. W. Kennedy. (2006). Game cultures: Computer games as new media: computer games as new media. McGraw-Hill International. Print.

Dyer-Witheford, N. and G. de Peuter (2009). Games of empire : global capitalism and video games. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Griffin, C. (1993). Representations of youth : the study of youth and adolescence in Britain and America. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge USA, Polity Press.

Edelman, L. (2004). No future : queer theory and the death drive. Durham, Duke University Press.

Griffin, C., et al. (2009). "Every time I do it I absolutely annihilate myself': Loss of (self-) consciousness and loss of memory in young people's drinking narratives." Sociology 43.3 (2009): 457-476.

Embrick, D. G., Wright, J. T., & Lukács, A. (2012). Social exclusion, power, and video game play: New research in digital media and technology. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Hall, S. and T. Jefferson (1993). Resistance through rituals: youth subcultures in post-war Britain. London, Routledge.

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Young man Luther : A study in psychoanalysis and history. New York: Norton. Hardt, M. and A. Negri. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Ess, C., and M. Thorseth. (2011). Trust and Virtual Worlds (Digital Formations). Peter Lang Publishing. Hardt, M. and A. Negri. (2004). Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. London : Penguin. Fanon, F. (1991). Black skin, white masks. New York, Grove Weidenfeld. Harvey, D. (2005). The new imperialism. London : Oxford University Press. Foucault, M, F. d. r. Gros, et al. (2005). The hermeneutics of the subject : lectures at the College de France, 1981-82. New York, Palgrave-Macmillan.

Harvey, D. (2010). The enigma of capital and the crises of capitalism. New York : Oxford.

Foucault, M., L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton. (1988). Technologies of the self : A seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Häggström-Nordin, E., U. Hanson, and T. Tydén. (2005). "Associations between pornography consumption and sexual practices among adolescents in Sweden." International journal of STD & AIDS 16.2: 102-107.

Fox, J. (2014). The game changer: How to use the science of motivation with the power of game design to shift behavior, shape culture and make clever happen. John Wiley & Sons. Print.

Heidegger, M. & Verlag, N. (1996). Being and time. SUNY Press.

Freud, A. (1965). Normality and pathology in childhood: Assessments of development. New York: International Universities Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Freud, S. & Rieff, P. (1997). General psychological theory: papers on metapsychology. New York, Touchstone.

Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The commercialization of intimate life: notes from home and work. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Freud, Sigmund, and Philip Rieff. 1997. General psychological theory: papers on metapsychology. 1st Touchstone ed. ed. New York: Touchstone.

Hochschild, A. R. and A. Machung (1989). The second shift: working parents and the revolution at home. New York, N.Y., Viking.

Friedenberg, E. Z. and E. H. Erikson (1970). The dignity of youth and other atavisms. Boston, Beacon Press.

Horkheimer, M. & O’Connell, M. J. (1972). Critical theory; selected essays. New York, Herder and Herder.

Fromm, E. (1961). Man for himself; an inquiry into the psychology of ethics. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Horkheimer, M., and T. W. Adorno. & Jephcott, E. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford University Press.

Fry, R. (2016). Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America's largest generation. Retrieved January 28, 2017, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/25/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/

Horowitz, A. (2008). Ethics at a standstill: History and subjectivity in Levinas and the Frankfurt School. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.

Fuchs, C. (2008). Internet and society: social theory in the information age. New York : Routledge.

Horowitz, G. (1977). Repression: Basic and surplus repression in psychoanalytic theory: Freud, Reich, and Marcuse. University of Toronto Press.

Funk, M. (2007). "I was a Chinese internet addict: A tale of modern medicine." Harper's Magazine (March): 7. Fuster, H. et al. (2014). "Relationship between passion and motivation for gaming in players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games." Cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking. Print.

Houtman, D., Aupers, S., & Koster, W. D. (2011). Paradoxes of individualization: Social control and social conflict in contemporary modernity. Farnham: Ashgate. Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo Ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Beacon Press.

Galloway, A. R. (2006). Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture (Electronic Mediations). Univ Of Minnesota Press. Gardner, H. (2013). App generation: How today's youth navigate identity, intimacy, and imagination in a digital world. Yale University Press.

Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. New York, Harper & Row. Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press. Irigaray, L. (2004). An ethics of sexual difference. London, Continuum.

Goldberg, H. (2011). All your base are belong to us: How 50 years of videogames conquered pop culture. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Ito, M. (2009). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. The MIT Press.

Lennie, S. (2013). Ethical complexities in the virtual world: teacher perspectives of ICT based issues and conflicts. University of Toronto. Print.

Juul, J. (2013). The art of failure: An essay on the pain of playing video games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levinas, E. & Lingis, A. (1998). Otherwise than Being. London: M. Nijhoff.

Kent, M. (2008). "Massive multi-player online games and the developing political economy of cyberspace." Fast capitalism 4.1. Print.

Levinas, E. & Lingis, A. (1979). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Springer.

Kernberg, O. F. (1998). Ideology, conflict, and leadership in groups and organizations. New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University press.

Livingstone, C. (2005). "Desire and the consumption of danger: Electronic gaming machines and the commodification of interiority." Addiction research & theory 13.6: 523-34. Print. Lorde, A. (1978). Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power. Brooklyn, N.Y., Out & Out Books.

King, D. L., P. H. Delfabbro, and M. D. Griffiths. (2013). "Trajectories of problem video gaming among adult regular gamers: An 18-month longitudinal study." Cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking 16.1: 72-76. Print.

Lukacs, G. & Livingstone, R. (1971). History and class consciousness; studies in Marxist dialectics. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Klein, M. (1963). Our adult world, and other essays. New York, Basic Books. Lyotard, J.-F. o. & Bennington, J. (1988). Peregrinations: law, form, event. New York, Columbia University Press. Klein, M. (1975). Love, guilt, and reparation & other works, 1921-1945. New York, Delacorte Press : Lawrence. Lyotard, J.-F. o. & Hamilton Grant, I. (1993). Libidinal economy. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. Klein, M. (1984). Envy and gratitude, and other works, 1946-1963. New York, Free Press. Mandel, E. (1975). Late capitalism. London Atlantic Highlands [N.J.], NLB Humanities Press. Kohut, H. (2013). The analysis of the self: A systematic approach to the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. University of Chicago Press.

Mander, J. (2001). Four arguments for the elimination of television. [New York]: Perennial.

Kordela, A. K. (2012). Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan. SUNY Press.

Manovich, L. (2013). Software takes command. New York: Bloomsbury.

Kristeva, J. & Bie Brahic, B. (2009). This incredible need to believe. New York, Columbia University Press.

Marcuse, H. (1941). “Some implications of modern technology.” Studies in philosophy and social sciences, 9, no. 3: 414-39.

Kristeva, J., M. Marder, and P. I. Vieira. (2007). "Adolescence, a syndrome of ideality." The psychoanalytic review 94.5: 715-25. Print.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One dimensional man; studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston, Beacon Press.

Kroker, A. (2004). The will to technology and the culture of nihilism: Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx. University of Toronto Press.

Marcuse, H. (1968). Negations: essays in critical theory. Boston, Beacon Press.

Lacan, J. & Fink, B. (2007) Ecrits. New York : W. W. Norton and Company.

Marcuse, H. (1972). Counterrevolution and revolt. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lacan, J., Miller, J., & Porter, D. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York [etc.: Norton.

Marcuse, H. (1974). Eros and civilization: a philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston, Beacon Press.

Lacan, J. (1977). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. Vol. International psycho-analytical library no. 106. London: Hogarth Press.

Marcuse, H. and D. Kellner (2001). Towards a critical theory of society. London ; New York, Routledge. Marx, K. (1990) Capital Volume 1. London : Penguin.

Laing, R. D. (1968). The politics of experience. New York : Ballantine. Marx, K. & Dobb, M. (1989). Contribution to the critique of political economy. [S.l.]: Int'L. Laing, R. D. (2011) The politics of the family. Boston : House of Anansi Press. Marx, K. & Milligan, M. (2011). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Blacksburg, VA: Wilder Publications. Lanier, J. (2010). You are not a gadget : a manifesto. New York, Alfred A. Knopf. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1967). The German ideology. New York, International Publishers. Lazzarato, M. (1996). “Immaterial labor.” Generation online. Retrieved from http://www.generation-online. org/c/fcimmateriallabor3.htm

Marx, Karl. (1948). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Moscow,: Foreign Languages Pub. House.

Lefebvre, H., N. Brenner, et al. (2009). State, space, world: selected essays. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Marx, Karl. & Nicolaus, M. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. [1st American ed, The Marx Library. New York,: Random House.

Massumi, B. (1992). A user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Piaget, J. (2013). Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. Vol. 25. Routledge. Picchi, A. (2016). “Where so many working men are: In pain or video-gaming.” CBS News. Moneywatch. October 14.

Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Postman, N. (2011). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Random House. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather : race, gender and sexuality in the colonial conquest. New York, Routledge.

Rank, O. (1929). The Trauma of Birth. International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method. London, New York: Kegan Paul, Trench Harcourt, Brace.

McGlotten, S. (2013). Virtual Intimacies: Media, affect, and queer sociality. SUNY Press. Print. McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. Penguin, 2011. Print.

Reich, W., M. Higgins, et al. (1983). Children of the future : on the prevention of sexual pathology. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux. Ricoeur, P. & Blamey, K. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting. University of Chicago Press.

McKenzie, F. (2007). “I was A Chinese internet addict.” Harper's magazine. New York, United States, New York. 314: 65-72.

Riesman, D., Glazer, N., & Denney, R. (2001). The lonely crowd: A study of the changing American character. New Haven: Yale University Press.

McLuhan, M. (1970). Culture is our business. New York,: McGraw-Hill. McRobbie, A. (2000). Feminism and youth culture. 2nd ed. ed. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Riviere, J. and A. Hughes (1991). The inner world and Joan Riviere: collected papers, 1920-1958. London; New York New York, Published by Karnac Books for the Melanie Klein Trust (London) Distributed in the U.S. by Brunner/Mazel.

Mojang. (2009). Minecraft. OS X version. Microsoft Studios. Molnar, A. (1996). Giving kids the business: the commercialization of America’s schools. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Rooij, A. J. van. (2011). Online video game addiction: Exploring a new phenomenon. Erasmus MC: University Medical Center Rotterdam. Print. Rustin, M. (1991). The good society and the inner world: Psychoanalysis, politics, and culture. Verso Books.

Moulier Boutang, Y. and E. Emery (2011). Cognitive capitalism. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, Polity Press. Sartre, J.-P. & Barnes, H. E. (2001). Being and nothingness. New York, NY: Citadel Press. Nancy, J., & Connor, P. (2004). The inoperative community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schoeder, B. (2009). Talhotblond. Answers Productions. Nardi, B. A. (2010). My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of World of warcraft. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Schüll, N. D. (2012). Addiction by design: Machine gambling in las vegas. Princeton University Press. Print.

Negri, A. (1999). “Value and affect.” Boundary, 2, 26(2), 77-88.

Schwarz, A. (2013). "The selling of attention deficit disorder." New york times. Print.

Nicoll, F. (2011). "On blowing up the pokies: The pokie lounge as a cultural site of neoliberal governmentality in Australia." Cultural studies review 17.2: 219-56. Print.

Seok, S., and B. DaCosta. (2012). "The world’s most intense online gaming culture: Addiction and highengagement prevalence rates among South Korean adolescents and young adults." Computers in human behavior 28.6: 2143-51. Print.

Nusselder, A. (2009). Interface fantasy: A Lacanian cyborg ontology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shaviro, S. (2010). Post cinematic affect. Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Olson, C. K., et al. (2007). "Factors correlated with violent video game use by adolescent boys and girls." Journal of adolescent health 41.1: 77-83. Print.

Shaw, A. (2013). "Rethinking game studies: A case study approach to video game play and identification." Critical studies in media communication 30.5: 347-61. Print.

O'Neill, J., and Laidlaw Foundation. (1994). The missing child in liberal theory: Towards a covenant theory of family, community, welfare, and the civic state. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Simondon, G. & Burk, D. S. (2012). Two lessons on animal and man. Minneapolis, MN, Univocal Pub., LLC.

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. New York, Penguin Press.

Sloterdijk, P. (2013). In the world interior of capital: Towards a philosophical theory of globalization. Polity.

Parish, S. M. (2008). Subjectivity and suffering in American culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.

Smythe, D. W. (1981). Dependency road : communications, capitalism, consciousness, and Canada. Norwood, N.J., Ablex Pub. Corp.

Peters, M. and E. Bulut (2011). Cognitive capitalism, education, and digital labor. New York, Peter Lang. Smythe, D. W. and T. H. Guback (1994). Counterclockwise : perspectives on communication. Boulder, Westview Press. Phillips, A. (1994). On kissing, tickling, and being bored: Psychoanalytic essays on the unexamined life. Harvard University Press.

Snodgrass, J. G. et al. (2013). "A formal anthropological view of motivation models of problematic MMO play: Achievement, social, and immersion factors in the context of culture." Transcultural psychiatry 50.2: 235-62. Print. Spivak, G. C. (1999). A Critique of postcolonial reason : Toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Stiegler, B. (2010). For a new critique of political economy. Cambridge: Polity.

Willis, P. E. (1981). Learning to labor : How working class kids get working class jobs. New York, Columbia University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Psychology Press. Wright, J. T., Embrick, D. G., & Lukács, A. (2010). Utopic dreams and apocalyptic fantasies: Critical approaches to researching video game play. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield.

Stiegler, B. (2010). Taking care of youth and the generations. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press. Wright, S. (2002). Storming heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian autonomous Marxism. London : Pluto. Stromberg, P. (2009). Caught in play: How entertainment works on you. Stanford University Press. Yee, N. (2006). "Motivations for play in online games.” Cyberpsychology & behavior 9.6: 772-75. Print. Stallabrass, J. (1993). “Just gaming: Allegory and economy in computer games.” New Left Review, 83-83. Young-Bruehl, E. (1996). The anatomy of prejudices. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. Sunden, J. (2002). In Fornas et al. (Eds.). (2010). “Cyberbodies, writing gender in digital self-presentations.” Digital borderlands: cultural studies of identity and interactivity on the internet, pp. 79-111. New York : Peter Lang.

Young-Bruehl, E. (2012). Childism : confronting prejudice against children. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Sweezy, P. P. (1942). The theory of capitalist development: principles of Marxian political economy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1942.

Zimbardo, P. & Coulombe, N. (2011). Man, interrupted: Why young men are struggling & what we can do about it. Conari Press.

Taylor, T. L. (2009). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Žižek, S. (2006). The parallax view. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Terranova, T. (2004). Network culture: Politics for the information age. London : Pluto.

Žižek, S. (2008). The plague of fantasies. London: Verso.

Terranova, T. (2010). “New economy, financialization and social production in the web 2.0.” In Fumagalli, A. and S. Mezzadra. Crisis in the global economy: financial markets, social struggles, and new political scenarios. Los Angeles : Random House.

Zwick, D. and N. Dholakia (2006). "The epistemic consumption object and postsocial consumption: Expanding consumer- object theory in consumer research." Consumption, markets & culture 9(1): 17-43.

Thomas, K., and R. Stevens. (1996). The defensive self: A psychodynamic perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Print. Tiqqun. (2012). Preliminary materials for a theory of the young-girl. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Trinh, T. M.-H. (1989). Woman, native, other : writing, postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Turkle, S. (2012). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books. Van Dijk, J. (2006). The network society. London : Sage. Second edition. Vollebergh, W. AM, J. Iedema, and Q. AW Raaijmakers. (2001). "Intergenerational transmission and the formation of cultural orientations in adolescence and young adulthood." Journal of marriage and family 63.4: 1185-1198. Vygotsky, L. S. & Kozulin, A. (2012). Thought and language. MIT press. Wark, M. (2004). A hacker manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wark, M. (2007). Gamer theory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Watkins, E. (1993). Throwaways: Work culture and consumer education. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Whitty, M. T., G. Young, and L. Goodings. (2011). "What I won’t do in pixels: Examining the limits of taboo violation in MMORPGs." Computers in human behavior 27.1: 268-75. Print.

Adnan Selimovic is an independent theorist, a Yugoslavian émigré currently residing in Malmö, Sweden. He has worked in the gaming industry, and has a PhD in interdisciplinary critical theory from Social and Political Thought at York University. He has taught at City University of New York, New York University, and Ithaca College. His writing has appeared in the Journal of International Education, and New Directions in Critical Youth Studies (ed. vol.).