Dialectical Horror Stories

Is it possible to write a dialectical horror story? (or fantasy?). 

First, I have a problem with the Deleuzian "new weird" type of argument, which treats the monstrous as merely monstrous from the position of the bourgeois ego, etc. Certainly there is some truth to this position. We could reread the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth as the moment of Lovecraft's embrace of the monstrous and miscegenation against his racism. 

"The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. ...
I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever." (my italics)

Another example would be Clive Barker, in which the horror gives way to the weird and fantasy, from The Damnation Game to Weaveworld. The Cabal tells the story of how the forces of law and order are the true monsters (see this excellent discussion). In a blunt reading, this would relate to Barker's own acceptance of his sexuality.

While this makes for good politics and some good fiction, much of the new weird, what can go missing is horror. Horror, in this reading, can only ever be momentary and needs to be surpassed by becoming. All becomings are good as such, as becomings, which I think is a bad dialectic (in lots of ways). We accept everything and potentially criticise nothing, after all it's a becoming baby... 

The risk of the counter position, my position, is that it seems reactionary. To have or celebrate horror would seem to be conditioned by the kind of rejection of the Other found in Lovecraft. Racism conditions horror (I tend to agree with Houellebecq that, in the case of Lovecraft, racism does condition much of his horror, although his fiction does exceed that at times). Can we imagine a dialectical horror that would not simply condemn the Other or treat it as moment of becoming? If Walter Benjamin wrote of dialectical fairy tales, can we have dialectical horror tales?

I was wondering about John Carpenter's argument re The Thing (my favourite film). He suggests two modes of horror: one reactionary, where the horror is outside the circle (as we tell stories around the camp fire) and one more radical where the monster is sat around the fire. The inside horror would be the dialectical horror.

[Obviously we can also think of The Fog, in which we start with exactly such a scene of story telling and in which the film will reveal the horror as being a result of the crime of the founding of the community (although the revenge doesn't exactly seem to fall on those responsible or their descendants).] 

The Thing is then a horror film of sociality and relations, and then the alien 'Thing'. It is a film of men in meetings, at which they have to decide 'who is who'. This is the horror of sociality, the stasis of the practico-inert in which they live from the start - simmering resentments and petty authority ('el capitano with his pop gun'). 

But the horror isn't only sociality, it is also the dialectic with the alien coming inside and the end of human civilisation (in 27,000 hours). This isn't a racist horror, in which the Other is feared as racial Other, but a horror of the inside. The dialectical moment is that horror that is inside in both senses, the implosion of the practico-inert in destructive violence that ends human life (the destruction of the camp) and the intrusion of 'the thing' into humanity to which the only solution is suicide, or waiting a while...

This is one, for me privileged example. I am tempted to also suggest Ligotti's abstraction of Lovecraft's great old ones to a cosmic 'dance' of decay and exhaustion also exhausts the localised racism of Cthulhu. Here, again, the outside and inside are rendered indistinguishable, as we are all puppets of the forces of the outside that are already inside. Here the abstract forces of decline (in some 'town'), seem also to be the forces of destitution of abstract capital and the forces of abstraction as moment of horror. Workplace horror, as in My Work Here is Done, is 'abstract labour' as the form of nothingness itself (as Marx suggests in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts - "the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who therefore tumbles day after day from his fulfilled nothingness into absolute nothingness".)

I am interested if you have other examples or think this is a reactionary position. I think a lot turns on the relation to the outside and hence, if it wasn't evident', I tend to reject the argument by Mark Fisher about the weird as intrusion of the outside (while of course feeling his loss). Dialectical horror is, precisely, horror of the mediation of inside and outside that resists us 'becoming outside'. In this sense, then, there is another political path to the new weird. A path through horror.

Much of the work of Blindfield has been devoted to the dialectical horror tale. This tentative effort by me is dedicated to that journal.

Brontë RPG

Not a Bronte Role-Playing Game, although that might well be interesting. I guess most people would want to play Emily... There is in fact a Jane Austen RPG, so it is not impossible to image a Bronte RPG. Although the constriction of the lives of the Bronte's, which as the cliche goes "produced" their imaginative fiction, wouldn't be much fun.

Instead I want to suggest the Bronte's invented an RPG, or a proto-RPG. One of the famous things about the Bronte's is how, as children, they created their own fantasy worlds. In June 1826 their father gave to Branwell Bronte some toy soldiers. Charlotte Bronte tells what happened next:

Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers Emily & I jumped out of bed and I snat[c]hed up one & exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! [Wellington was the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he had defeated the French leader Napoléon Bonaparte at the famous Battle of Waterloo.] When I said this Emily likewise took one & said it should be hers when Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole & perfect in every part Emilys was a Grave looking fellow we called him Gravey. Anne's was a queer little thing very much like herself. [H]e was called Waiting Boy[.] Branwell chose Bonaparte.

A year later Branwell and Charlotte would create the imaginary kingdom of Glasstown, a colonial fantasy city in West Africa. They would later create Angria, an extension of Glasstown. Emily and Anne would start their own project, the kingdom of Gondal, rejecting the violence they found in Branwell's and Charlotte's world ('Angria' could obviously signify 'anger').

These creations involved creating plays and a vast amount of writing contained in small 'matchbooks'. The writings are also taken as what Charlotte called 'a long apprenticeship in writing', as juvenilia, before the 'mature' and 'real' works they wrote as novelists (Branwell being, of course, the dissipated non-writer). I am not going to re-evaluate these writings, but suggest that rather than read them as transitions into fiction we read them as proto-RPGs. Branwell and Charlotte are both game designers and game masters (GMs), Branwell shifting from war games (he destroyed a lot of models) to this RPG (Branwell is an Amerithrash gamer...)

This is not only to shift the notion from "apprenticeship to play" (Robertson, 1998), but also to specify what kind of play. Although started when Charlotte was ten, Branwell nine, Emily eight, and Anne six, this play continued into adulthood.  In 1845 Emily (aged 27) and Anne (aged 25) "passed the two days of a train journey role-playing together, pretending they were a whole class of royalist prisoners escaping from Gondel" (Moon, 46). Michael Moon uses role-playing in a general sense, but his remark struck me as one we could make specific.

So, rather than being a childhood addiction to "romance" (in the general sense, including that of quest narratives and fantasy), this might be an addiction to constructing an interactive fiction in the form of an RPG. More sympathetic critics, as Michael Moon points out, have seen this "never-ending story" (a quote from Jane Eyre), as an act of mourning for their dead siblings and mother. The soldiers were given a year after Maria's death (the elder sister).

Michael Moon also concentrates on Branwell, the one who did not become a writer and so did not transcend the "infernal world" of Angria. Branwell is the destructive character, but also in rebellion against the children's choice, suggested by Charlotte, that they become Genii and rule over the toy soldiers. Branwell's compulsion to write, his 'spoiled' or 'wasted' life, become a kind of model of the RPG player and the associations with military masculinity, sensitively explored by Moon. (I should admit here my own childhood fascination with toy soldiers and my own destruction of such soldiers in various "wars".)

Therefore, we could imagine this game as the creation of what would later become RPGs. It is not so much a transition to the "realism" of adult writing, or simply something "childish", but a particular kind of creative work, a particular kind of art. 

Further Reading
Michael Moon, Darger's Resources (Duke University Press, 2012), Chapter 2
Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte (Virago, 2006)
Robertson, Leslie. "I. Changing Models of Juvenilia: Apprenticeship or Play?" ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 24 no. 3, 1998, pp. 291-298. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/esc.1998.0004

The New Testament of Keyforge

To follow on from my post about Keyforge, the new unique card game by MTG designer Richard Garfield, I want to consider something strange about the lore of Keyforge. I want to mention how weirdly close it is to the New Testament. I am not Christian, but I am not interested in 'blasphemy'.

I'm interested in a coincidence of terminology between Keyforge and the new 'pitilessly literal' translation of the New Testament by David Bentley Hart (which I think you should you read, as I have, if you are religious or Christian or not or whatever). A translation which has been described as mind-bending, which is a nice way to put it. What are these links?

Archons
The main one is the Archons. In the game of Keyforge you are an Archon, now according to the lore in the new rulebook (which can be found on this page) 'Child gods, or manifestations of a central AI, or transcended mortals, or beings of pure energy'.
You, the Archon, have a deck, made of four houses, which is all the creatures, artifacts and events you have gathered to compete in the world of the crucible. What is interesting is that David Bentley Hart uses Archon a lot in his translation of the New Testament. In particular, translating the letters of Paul (summarised here), he suggests a New Testament theology of

the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations.

The world of Keyforge is one of cosmic battle, although the lore does its best to minimise combat and, in the game, collecting Aember, the resource, is more important than combat.

Logos
At a more minor level 'Logos' is a house in Keyforge. They are the intellectuals and scholars, again according to the lore, the scientists, divided into theorists and mechanists. Logos is also the incarnation of God as the word, as it is usually translated. For David Bentley Hart, however:

the Word—as a word—does not suffice: He finds it to be “a curiously bland and impenetrable designation” for the heady concept expressed in the original Greek of the Gospels as Logos. The Chinese word Tao might get at it, Hart tells us, but English has nothing with quite the metaphysical flavor of Logos, the particular sense of a formative moral energy diffusing itself, without diminution, through space and time. So he throws up his hands and leaves it where it is: “In the origin there was the Logos …” (see here)

There is no real link here, Logos in the game has the meaning of technology and has no particular 'spiritual' sense. The coincidence just struck me.

Two weird coincidences then? I like think something more could be said. Jean Baudrillard once said “it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like “mana” once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology” (In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities 4).

So, rather than the official concepts of analysis we might get more out of problem concepts, projections, deranged or even 'wrong' understandings, hence Baudrillard's use of the masses. Archons, maybe more than the minor case of Logos, might resonate more in a weird way with the powers and constraints of the game, of our experience, of the cosmic war of Keyforge and the strange cosmic war of the first centuries of what became the 'Christian era'. Maybe, as with WB Yeats, you can draw parallels with beginnings and ends, with rough beasts slouching to be born, or with strange card games that recreate a cosmic war.

The Nine Billion Names of Keyforge

Keyforge (2018) is a new card game by Richard Garfield (designer of Magic The Gathering, not so much a card game as a way of life…). It is a Collectible Card Game (CCG) and so seemingly one of those pits of time and money that can be this kind of game. What makes it different is that it is a unique game as each deck is just that, generated algorithmically. There are, the makers say, "104 quadrillion possible decks".So, rather than building decks with cards, what you have are different decks you play against each other. The decks have a different mix of three factions, drawn from Brobnar, Mars, Sanctum, Logos, Dis, and Shadows.

One of the other things is unique and algorithmically generated is the deck name. The result is a strange poetics. What Keyforge reveals is the autonomy of the signifier (what we usually think of as words), the material ‘bit’ of language, that shapes and generates meaning. These signifiers generate signified, ideas, out of the material manipulation of language. In line with the linguist Saussure, it is not that language reflects the world, rather the system of language, which is arbitrary, constitutes our world.

What Keyforge reveals is the strange material space of language that pre-exists us and even ‘speaks’ us. Here a procedural algorithm makes a certain kind of sense, beyond even human control. There have been problems...

The most notorious problem deck name is "Titanflayer, the Farmer of Racism" (so far)

Here is the statement by the manufacturers:

Archon names in KeyForge are procedurally generated by an algorithm that pulls from a list that includes tens of thousands of words. The result is that every Archon name (i.e. every deck name) generated by the algorithm is unique. Regrettably, some of the words that were included in the pool created the potential for defective Archon Decks with an unfortunate pairing of words.

We could just consider this an error, rapidly and responsibly dealt with by the company (which it is). We could also consider it the fault of humans, who did not sift or limit the signifiers used (why include "racism" at all, as many asked?)

The algorithms that generate the Keyforge names forge those names out of our signifiers. In doing so they reveal our unconscious. Especially if, as Jacques Lacan argued, the unconscious is structured like a language. Freud had revealed, in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, how slips of the tongue can reveal our desires and intentions. What an algorithmic ‘slip’ can reveal, which obviously seems to lack any intentions or desires, is. Ironically, our desires embedded in language.

What Keyforge reveals is the intersection between the seemingly neutral world of language and the "stuff" of enjoyment. The rise of the alt right, the resurgence (again) of active and explicit racism, seem to make a “Farmer of Racism” a figure of our moment – “racism” grown, or tended, or “organically” generated… Lacan said that racism would resurge as a result of spreading competition over enjoyment (jouissance – the French signifier has the radical sense of sexual enjoyment).

Too much? Just a card game? But the storm around the names, and the other "unfortunate" names are sexual (“General Bonerider Cult”), suggest something about our language and our enjoyment.

If that's not enough the mass scale of this experiment, even if not successful by CCG standards (it seems a lot of people hope Keyforge will fail), is a remarkable poetic experiment as well. We have witnessed the emergence of drone poetics and algorithmic poetics, but Keyforge is that as a kind of concrete "flash" poetry. It might not even be surprising that such a poetic experiment, like so many other modernist experiments, should court reactionary or politically dubious sentiments... 

Learning to Board Game in the Anthropocene

I started modern board gaming early last year. This was thanks to Shut Up & Sit Down. I don’t remember how I came across their Youtube channel, but I got addicted to it. Then thanks to my partner, we started gaming. We began with Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu and now we’re in Euroland (Nusfjord is the current game of choice). 

A recent FB post by a friend pointed out how the BGG list (Board Game Geek – the austere and functional web site bible of modern board gaming) of games about climate change embodied a liberal vision of technological fixes. This goes into a full accelerationist direction with Futuropia, a Freidman and Friese game about managing the transition from full automation (a left accelerationist slogan) into a society of leisure.

Martian Chronicles

This got me thinking about other imaginations of the future, particularly climate change, in board games. I mentioned Terraforming Mars (2016) (our favourite game – a card tableau/engine builder about, yes, the title…). This is a game really about the slow pace of such fixes, it is played over generations, usually 9-12, and set in the 2400s. In a nice touch, the rulebook has the three players as Kim, Stanley and Robinson, a nod to its roots in the Marxist sicfi of Kim Stanley Robinson. Unfortunately it does not have a communist revolution expansion, and it’s politics are largely some satirical jibes at the corporations you play and the chance to play Tharsis Republic, the nearest to communists you can get in the game.

There are obviously a series of recent games about nature that seem to be reflections on climate change and ecological system: from Photosynthesis, growing trees, to Haven, in which the ‘city’ battles ‘nature’. Also, there have been debates about the use of plastic, cardboard and wood in games, and transport costs (most games seem to be made in China). Obviously, also board games are a kind of reaction against the digital and a turn to the tactile and physical. While you do see climate denialism in posts (games about climate change or comments on them are ‘politics’), my feeling is the community is much like the Internet as a whole, with vociferous deniers against broad acceptance.

Then I read this piece by Stephanie Wakefield on infrastructure in the Anthropocene. She identifies a modern liberal vision of infrastructure, one of progress and modernist solutions, that has fractured into a vision of resilience, building and managing catastrophic change, and ‘dwelling in the ruins’, a vision of living with catastrophe. These I think can be mapped on to games.

Resilience

Much of modern board gaming, in its Euro form, is, as the game reviewer Radho has noted, basically about being a middle manager. Against our current preoccupation with ‘heroic entrepreneurs’ (Bezos, Thiel, Dyson, etc), in board games you are often just managing, against the game and against other players. You are often running something, so not fully middle manager, but you exist in a tight and constrained space. In terms of climate change, it might be that Blackout: Hong Kong (2018), by Alexander Pfister, is the game of crisis management. A blackout occurs in Hong Kong, the state fails, and you step in to sort things out (although you don’t get the power back on).

Certainly, as Radho has also pointed out this game could be seen as a libertarian fantasy, as you and your ‘workers’ try to deal with a blackout in which the state has failed (this could be given a left spin, but probably that would be a spin). I haven’t played this game yet, but want to. It does seem to be considered ‘themeless’, which is a shame. Obviously not directly about climate change, this does seem to be a game about urban crisis as resulting in a failure in infrastructure and how to cope with that.

‘Dwelling in the Ruins’

Dwelling in the ruins would seem to fit the post-apocalyptic world of gaming, which preoccupies board gaming as much as it does all other forms of modern culture. An apocalyptic vision of disaster and salvage, obviously inspired by Mad Max and its reboots, is fairly common. One game, which I have played, does stand out, and that is Kero. Kero, as in Kerosene, is another post-apocalyptic case of resource gathering. Kero has really nice graphics and is a real time game in which the timer, a fuel lorry, is your supply of kerosene (i.e. sand). I actually find real time games too stressful (see also Galaxy Trucker). But, this is also a game that really embodies limited resources and gives the post-apocalyptic landscape a management rather than warfare dimension (also maybe the stress should be the point of a climate change game...). As it is a French game it is also interesting in the context of the fuel tax and the movement of the gilets Jaunes…

Ruins and resilience

If resilience models can underestimate the catastrophe of climate change, still relying on modernist technological fixes, then ruins models can glory in despair and fetishise catastrophe. If there really hasn’t been a truly successful climate change novel I’ve found, perhaps Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora comes close, then it might not be a surprise that I don’t have a solution game here. [1] What I would say is that board games do pose interesting questions of management. There is no doubt that many of these games are ‘capitalist’, in the specific and broad sense (‘trading in the Mediterranean) – this would be another post. Yet, in the mode of reflection on crisis and the management of crisis they also very directly speak to our moment.

Notes

[1] Weirdly, there is a generation ship game, Gen 7, unfortunately it does not seem to be that good...