Abstract
This essay examines the global logics of neoliberalism, and the biopolitical and affective modes of experience that neoliberalism generates. American soldiers, playing games and fighting wars, are living embodiments of the Military Industrial Media Entertainment Network, where boundaries are blurred, information flow is rapid, and cyber imagery prevails. But this is not merely a postmodern space of hybridity; neoliberalism is a biased, so-called laissez-faire re-organization of material and capital flows, designed to glorify the capacities of the market to rule space, consumption, and government without any regard for democratic citizenship. Playing with virtual fields of violence literally as they execute the violent technologies of war, to advance the neoliberal projects of American neoconservative ideologues, soldiers claim that these combat games help them to escape the emotional trials of war. These gamers and their games teach us that neoliberalism is more than privatization of capital, but that it is a way of organizing experience through habits of bodily movement and affect.
Keywords
This project is about soldiers in the U.S. military who play First Person Shooter (FPS) combat video games while serving in the theaters of war in Iraq or Afghanistan. During the last three years, I have interviewed twenty-five such service people, all men living in the Midwestern United States, and visited an American Army base. Many researchers have examined the way gamers engage these combat video games, but this analysis is unique in its focus on what have been termed “joy stick soldiers.” During one of the first interviews, in describing one of his gaming “moments,” a young soldier offered a story that became emblematic of the prevailing argument I wish to pursue. A tank operator stationed somewhere in Iraq in 2007, he occasionally filled his downtime by playing an FPS game called America’s Army using his mini PC laptop, from with inside the his M1 Abrams tank itself. Originally produced by the U.S. Army in preparation for Desert Storm training in 2003—the game was later sold in stores and can now be downloaded from the Internet for free. The act of playing this video game from inside of a U.S. tank in combat creates a space that Louis Althusser might term overdetermined, in which a number of structural conditions conspire at once to produce an effect or an outcome in which any one of those conditions alone could have produced the same outcome.
My theoretical stakes and main thesis center on the global logics of neoliberalism, and on the biopolitical and affective modes of experience that neoliberalism generates. Neoliberalism, affect, and embodiment are here relocated within a critical space that seeks insight into how contemporary forms of military play maneuver the soldiering body. Neoliberalism and affect have been deployed in so many diverse and, at times, contradictory ways, that it is necessary to articulate precisely their usage in this project. American soldiers, playing games and fighting wars, are living embodiments of what James Der Derian (2009) has called the Military Industrial Media Entertainment Network, or MIME-NET. 1 These soldiers and their FPS games are performers in what might be termed a neoliberal landscape as defined by Catherine Chaput (2010), with a conspicuously cultural framework as the “blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode.” But this is not merely a postmodern space of hybridity; neoliberalism is a biased, so-called laissez-faire re-organization of material and capital flows, designed to glorify the capacities of the market to rule space, consumption, and government without any regard for democratic citizenship. For most neoliberal theorists, free choice and free markets reign.
Many seek to understand how neoliberalism works, from Foucault (2008) to Gilbert (2013) to Harvey (to name but a few), while others question the validity of the term itself, including Davies (2017) and Povinelli (2011). Povinelli acknowledges the ways in which neoliberal markets create a need among people to measure their worthiness in terms of material considerations and competitive achievements, but she doubts the purchase of the term, even as a critique of free markets and free will. She seeks instead to redeem liberalism, or late liberalism as she terms it, as a model for human beings to learn how to empathize with those who are different, in terms of class, nationality, race, and gender, for example. In this essay, the political economy of neoliberalism is viewed as one creating social orders that turn on excesses of affective energy, immaterial labor, violence, and in Foucauldian terms that are especially appropriate for these military gamers, regimes of biopower, but all in the service of profitability.
Nonetheless, we proceed here cognizant of the contested nature of neoliberal theory, as well as one of the more well-known deployments of neoliberal rationality, governmentality. These are always multiple, contingent upon dispersed affective assemblages of social alliances, desire, and disjuncture.
I believe that liberal or even late liberal technologies of management marginalize the presence of affect, especially affect as viewed by Massumi (2015, pp. 22-27), as an intensity of encounter. In contrast to neoliberalism, liberal logic then categorically distinguishes cognition and emotion, locating them within a stable, bounded individual. In contrast, neoliberal management of affect—often reliant on the collection and deployment of caches of data—generates more fleeting affective (consumptive) encounters with objects and signs so that personhood becomes an enterprise for all who inhabit the world, but one that may too quickly vanish and be refashioned. Moreover, with Massumi, I assert that neoliberalism deploys affective technologies to center public energies on the assessment of threat—such as terrorism, for example—the analysis of risk, and the investment in preemptive security measures.
Joystick soldiers (Huntemann & Payne, 2010), then, play with virtual fields of violence literally as they execute the technologies of war, to advance the neoliberal projects of American neoconservative ideologues, 2 and they often claim that these combat games help them to escape the emotional trials of war. They escape to geopolitical landscapes where they may murder, virtually, hundreds and hundreds of enemy fighters in several minutes, and until more recently, the gamers’ avatars never raped, killed children, encountered refugees, or suffered combat stress reactions (below, I examine games that do depict these consequences of war). Such soldiers and their games teach us in fairly clear terms what Foucault meant when he wrote that neoliberalism is more than privatization of capital, but that it is a way of organizing experience through habits of bodily movement and thought.
I believe that it is precisely this affective subjectivity, seemingly at odds with political and moral agency, with which the MIME-NET is poised to engender in “its” military members. And so, I want to proceed by offering and analyzing ethnographic portraits that convey the elements of this neoliberal production of desire in combat. Ultimately, by asking if the system so overdetermined as to render it impenetrable, inspired by Hardt and Negri, we look for ways to support the agency of the multitude, hoping that this MIME-NET, among other networks, can be challenged by creative, critically engaged forms of citizenship.
Discourse
or
Affect, Discourse
and
Affect
This essay engages a tension that exists between, on one hand, interpretations arguing these war game videos communicate an array of symbols and meanings according to a particular ideology, such as the “West against the Arabs,” for example, and on the other hand, interpretations claiming that they represent intensities of affect, succeeding at a preconscious, pre-discursive, and nonsymbolic plane. In re-imagining the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Lawrence Grossberg (1992), an early so-called affect theorist, explained how affective sensibility is prior to representational meaning but nonetheless works on and through “the social”: Affect is perhaps the most difficult plane of human life to . . . describe, not merely because it is a-signifying . . . but also because there is no critical theory to describe its different forms and structures . . . Affect is closely tied to what we often describe as the “feeling” of life . . . Some things feel different from others, some matter more or in different ways than others. The same experience will change drastically as its affective investment . . . changes. The same object, with the same meaning, giving the same pleasure, is very different in different affective contexts. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that different affective contexts inflect meanings and pleasures in very different ways. Affect operates across all of our senses and experiences, across all of the domains of effects which construct daily life. Affect is what gives “color,” “tone,” or “texture” to the lived. (pp. 80-81)
Grossberg embraced the mutual importance of discursive and affective investments, encouraging scholars of neoliberalism to incorporate both practices into their analyses. Here, I follow Anderson (2016) in offering a vision of the neoliberal that turns foremost on affect. In what follows, I provide ethnographic insights from the world of war game videos that suggest affect is indeed paramount and that is it critical to the kinds of labor, worldviews, and desires that drive neoliberalism. The soldiers who play these games, as well as the young men and women, even children who play, are—like many Americans and westerners—seduced by a world where vectors of danger, fear, and armed enemies are closing in. Such a world requires perpetual war, or as Hardt and Negri (2000) argue, It is increasingly difficult for the ideologues of the United States to name a single, unified enemy; rather there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere. The end of the crisis of modernity has given rise to a proliferation of minor and indefinite crises, or . . . an omni-crisis. Importantly, desire (for violence) is the structure of feeling animating and propelling this limitless danger and these boundless enemies. (p. 189)
For many, affect is not merely nor even that same thing as emotion or feeling (see Massumi, 2015), having been “often viewed as a preliminal, preconscious phenomenon” (Watkins, 2010, p. 269). Ben Anderson (2010, p. 161) clarified that, “[a]ffects are understood as impersonal intensities that do not belong to a subject or an object, nor do they reside in the mediating space between a subject and an object.” One wonders then, how can a symbolic anthropologist conducting ethnographic fieldwork—based in part on interviews—hope to generate insight into affect, this plane of social energy that most affect theorists argue is not, in essence, semiotic in nature. Committing to ethnography here indeed risks the excesses that may accompany phenomenology, but this research seeks a more nuanced appraisal of the “genealogies, conditionalities, performativities, and potentialities of different affects” (Anderson, 2010, p. 161). Kathleen Stewart (2007), affect theorist and ethnographer, explains how affects “work not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social wordings of all kinds . . . their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts they make possible” (p. 3).
IDEOLOGY and the MIME-NET
Many recognize the particular narratives conveyed by war video games, with protagonists and antagonists fighting for various state militaries or sometimes as paramilitary or guerilla forces. These video stories often highlight the moral virtuosity of the protagonist fighter(s) and his nation, indeed his empire, while constructing the enemy as a dangerous other. C. Richard King and David Leonard (2010, p. 91), analyzing the discursive content of American video games, described the “. . . relationships between the video game industry (including citizenry/players) and the state (the government and the military) as the state uses virtual spaces . . . and tools of garnering consent, all in the name of preparing its military and constituents for colonial exercises of spatial domination” [emphasis added]. To briefly illustrate, they reveal, “. . . how war video games construct and imagine places like Iraq and Afghanistan as barren wastelands devoid of civilians and infrastructure in need of saving and U.S. intervention.”
All of these discursive narratives and images emerge in the very war video games played by my research participants, who—as members of the military—are uniquely situated to reflect on the intersections of the simulated and natural battlefields and on the experiences of serving as the armed labor of empire. The video games, commonly played in the theaters of war, offer stories about the world’s geopolitical landscapes, in which the “brown” enemies are so often Arabic and/or Islamic, hiding in lawless, exotic deserts (or far flung tropics). Such games also work to construct the moral goodness of the FPS and his comrades. The popular game “Full Spectrum Warrior” begins, for example, with the words of American General Krulak (a real person), encouraging his troops for battle: . . . our service members will be feeding and clothing displaced refugees—providing humanitarian assistance. In the next moment, they will be holding two warring tribes apart—conducting peacekeeping operation. Finally, they will be fighting a highly lethal midintensity battle all on the same day. All within three city blocks . . . . (See Halter, 2006, p. 231)
These games are often purposeful retellings of particular wars, especially the two Gulf wars and the invasion of Afghanistan, perhaps even sketching “cognitive maps” of the Middle East (Leonard & King, 2009, p. 100). Some games are simulations of particular battle missions, such as Six Days in Falluja, in which the FPS helps to root out global terrorists lurking in a dense urban landscape (Manchin & Suleiman, 2006).
Theses FPS video games, the most popular of which—among my participants—are the series Call of Duty, Battlefront, Halo, and Counterstrike, perform narratives whose relationships with ideological model of geopolitical conflict is not difficult to identify. But in this essay, the prevailing conceptualization of power, as so many effects of neoliberal constellations of affect, is understood as imminent to the whole of social and material relations rather than as a strategy of the State, or the owners of the means of production, or even the bourgeois, to dominate.
Affect and the MIME-NET
In contrast to the examples in the previous section—which seem to suggest that representations of war turn on discourse and ideology regarding global conflict 3 —Brian Massumi (1998) insists that technologies of war and the success of empire now function primarily in terms of affect: “All you need to do is feel—a oneness with the prospective dead hero, and, based on that, hostility for the hypothetical enemy” (p. 45). He is one of a group of affect theorists who consider affect—an energy distinct from mere emotion—to be unconscious, nonrepresentational, prediscursive and nonlinguistic. Preceding all of these things, affect is an untamed intensity that, in excess, impacts the mind and body (Anderson, 2010; Bennett, 2001; Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008). My findings indeed accord with Massumi’s claim that affect is paramount, but unlike the ambitious claims of these affect theorists, I acknowledge that simultaneous significance of discourse (see Wetherell, 2012), in so far as these war video games help soldiers to map narrative and even ideology onto bodies and spaces. However, even more than narratives about “good guys and bad guys,” it is a set of affective sensibilities that the power brokers of the MIME-NET most seek to cultivate in civilians and soldiers.
Active duty soldiers typically play FPS war games in spaces that military bases dedicate to recreation. Some of my research participants referred to these areas as the E-Club (Enlisted Club), and others called them USOs, although the standard term is MWRs (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation). An army veteran, recently returned from Afghanistan, noted that, the Army has made a big push to provide entertainment for soldiers; for instance, on Ft. Riley there’s a building called the “Warrior Zone,” where there is a bank of some thirty work computers, some thirty gaming computers (with top notch alienware stuff), six pool tables, TVs, and some odd console stations with big flatscreens. It also had a built-in movie theater, a bar/kitchen for food, drinks, and piss beer! (Fieldnotes, May 3, 2013)
My research focus was the way in which soldiers played and “read” these games. I spent time sitting on couches watching gamers, trying at time to participate with the coaching help of informants, too often with such dreadful results that I was excused from the game.
While reading this ethnographic material—featuring the words of my participants—one must appreciate the special difficulty if not irony of trying to verbalize in speech the experience of this Massumian pre-discursive, deeply embodied intensity of affect. In fact, the notion of ethnography, as it has informed this analysis, is not merely an effort to secure a set of data from discrete interviews or even to observe in detail of an array of behaviors. Indeed, here ethnography is theory, a particular form of critique, a model of engagement, and an interrogation of networked practices of which human subjects are but one strand. As such, these MWRs and the off-base apartments of soldiers and veterans are merely one space among a global assemblage of war gaming. Importantly, it must certainly be acknowledged that the most preferred space for this kind of ethnographic research, which was beyond the ethnographer’s network of connections and funding, is to join soldiers to watch them play games in active theaters of combat.
Within that context, then, the following passages taken from four interviews with U.S. veterans with battlefield experiences offer important insight.
We play these games because they bring us closer together, as soldiers. It’s a place we’ve all been part of, the battlefield. The tension. It’s like a war-bonding. Even if I am playing with guys I didn’t fight with, as long as they served—in battle, I mean—I know what they’re thinking, why they’re gonna move the way they do. Yeah, even though the game is war, playing with those guys calms me. (26-year old active service, November 14, 2011)
Just like in battle, video gaming kind of dulls your mind . . . your actions are trained, automatic. That’s why it’s relaxing. You can even do things on the screen that can’t be done on the field, or things you wouldn’t have the chance to try . . . phoning in a bird, for example (something he never did). You don’t worry about command, you just work with your brothers, hoping they good piece of gear. (27-year old active service, February 6, 2012)
Some people say that gaming is not anything like real war, but you really have to plan, and coordinate with your players. You can play out different strategies. The games are full of violence, of course, but you learn team work and you learn to see, to see everything. No puckered asses, it’s totally safe, but you can imagine the danger . . . you get in touch with your fear. The fear everyone feels in battle can be re-created in the game, but it’s not so bad. It’s like you learn to act and think in dangerous situations, but with partial fear. (35-year old Army veteran, February10, 2012)
The fourth set of interview comments are from a 54-year-old man who served in the first Gulf War, where he was involved in firefights (“gun play”) in Kuwait. He focused completely on the sound of the firearms:
The one thing I remember most from war was the sound of gunfire. Everywhere was “p-p-p-p-p-p.” Don’t ask me why, but I love that sound. It scared the shit out of me at first, but got to love it. When I play call of duty, being surrounded by the “p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p” of rifles and faster sounds from machine guns. Sometimes I cry. Just hearing them. Sometimes I focus more. (Army veteran, July 18, 2011)
While only slightly more than half of the gaming research participants spoke to emotions, or even the affective dimensions of FPS experiences per se, none discussed the ways games taught them about the ideological fissures of world politics. Perhaps, however, such discursive mapping does unfold at less conscious levels to imbue gamers with reinforcing notions of the bad guy–good guy landscape.
Although some women play war video games, the overwhelming majority—certainly among active duty soldiers—are male, and the gaze of the FPS in mainstream games is masculine (see Leonard, 2006; Salter & Blodgett, 2012). Indeed, the spaces of wars and battle have been historically inscribed as masculine (Enloe, 2000; Leonard, 2006; King 2007; Christensen & Rasmussen 2017). FPS war games work to construct hypermasculine identities that marginalize women and highlight male competence with weapons, (aggressive) protection, and cyber-technology. According to the men in this study, women might join their boyfriends and sometimes husbands in playing FPS games, seldom choosing such activities on their own. Further, in racial-ethnic terms, the men interviewed here included one Native American, two Latinos, and two black Americans, so the cohort was overwhelming White.
None of these four participants quoted previously highlighted the narrative dimensions of their games, although on occasion, other participating soldiers noted such features. Generally, however, their experiences were fairly typical in terms of their focus on emotion, camaraderie, and a sort of noncognitive, dissociative sensibility of relaxation. Finally, although it seems almost too obvious to state, the participants found the cyber play to be quite pleasurable, and I claim their cyber fixations are anticipated by the notion of Deleuzian desire. Deleuze and Guattari considered desire to be a productive force—multiple, explosive, material—rather than a psychoanalytic “lack” (Zizek, 2012). It is a political force that drives what Deleuze and Guattari metaphorically refer to as a “desiring machine,” with the ability to re-assemble social structure and social relations.
Maria Frostling-Henningsson’s research analyses of war gaming among nonmilitary civilians seemed to anticipate my findings, that affect was central for these soldiers (First Person). In a context where gaming is feeling, her respondents, whom she refers to as “brothers in blood,” demonstrate that “killing is a social act” (Frostling-Henningsson, 2019, p. 559). In the following description of a field interview I conducted, the centrality of the affective social dimension of video war games emerges with some clarity. Research participants were often happy to accommodate my wish to observe them playing, and one particular evening in the spring of 2013, a 31-year-old army veteran, Jeremy, brought me to his basement—where all of his gaming equipment was set up—to introduce me to the game Medal of Honor (released in 2010). We sat on a threadbare couch in old blankets, and he used a standard joystick to start the game. The protagonists—the role of whom this man adopted—were U.S. Special Forces, conducting a mission in Gardez, Afghanistan:
It is nighttime, and in the corner the game screen reads 23:00 hours. Four U.S. shoulders gather, including the commander, and all are sitting on rugged four-wheel vehicles. The commander informs his comrades, “The mission is to get to OP Clementine. The route is loaded to our GPSs. Looks like we’ve got some squirrely terrain ahead, so eyes open. If something doesn’t look right, I want to hear about it.” The others refer to the avatar—the representation of whomever is playing the game—as Deuce, so I am sitting with “Deuce” or Jeremy on the basement couch, watching his participation in the mission.
On screen, the four men split into two teams, and ride out of a gate, leaving behind the relative safety a sort of make-shift base. They race through rugged, arid, semi-mountainous terrain, on dirt trails punctuated by potholes, rocks, and deep puddles. The images we see reflect the viewpoint of Deuce, and his steering bars and the front of his vehicle are visible on the screen and his headlights allow him to see the trail and his fellow soldiers. Suddenly, the commander orders his team, over the closed radio system, to “Go soft; lights out,” because he spies some trucks up ahead. After the trucks pass, the little convoy reassembles as a team of four and they approach a village. The turn off the vehicles.
“We’re on foot for now,” advises the commander. “Proceeding north side to village to get eyes on situation.” They come upon an enemy compound, presumably occupied by the Taliban, spotting a tower. The commander warns, “Dusty, we got a gizzy in a tower,” and tells Deuce to “get eyes on the tower.” Jeremy then, as Deuce, with perfect aim shoots an armed man atop the tower with a scoped assault rifle.
Then they enter the compound, encountering Taliban soldiers again and again as they weave their way through various rooms, stairs, decks, and towers within the compound. The enemy are wearing traditional Afghan clothing, long loose-fitting shirts and open vests, with kufi-style head caps. Afghan tribal carpets lay in several of the rooms. The Americans repeatedly shoot and kill enemies with nearly unbelievable precision, and throughout the mission, and depictions of these killings typically highlights spattered blood. I suspect overall Jeremy kills some 25 combatants.
His gaze is fixated on the screen, and he constantly winces and moves his body and controller so as to assert imaginary English to his avatar, gun, and vehicle. He sips from a can of Red Bull, already opened and setting on a side table, when we first descended to the basement. Compared to many gamers I have watched, he is fairly quiet, although after shooting one combatant in the face he did exclaim, “He got face-raped!” (see Salter & Blodgett, 2012).
Deuce and another soldier, Rusty, split off and exit the compound, and head for another village several miles further. Encountering a new group of Taliban, they see a sentry in the distance, and radio a sniper. “Get the Barret out . . . can you see that guy outside the hut?” “PID. Terminate.” We hear the sniper say, “WILCO. D, 600 meters. Wind out of the west. Five nots. Send it.” After that, a series of rapid gunfire battles between the Americans, now once again joined by the other two, and the Taliban fights. Vastly outnumbered, the Americans kill fighter after fighter, with a seemingly endless supply of ammunition clips.
Jeremy plays for about 30 minutes. “This could go on for well over an hour. But that’s a good example of how I play these games.” This time he takes a swig from his Red Bull.
Remaining on the couch, Jeremy discusses his own sense of the significance of FPS games for military people. Like most users of FPS war videos, Jeremy first played them as a teenager, but after serving in a theater of battle, his reaction to them has changed. “I often play on-line, with other veterans. We are in our own houses and we can all see the same screen. We talk with ear and microphones. Playing with those guys really brings you back. You just know what others are thinking. You all remember the thrill and the fear of real battle. It’s a kind of solidarity.” The comments from Jeremy and most of the other gamers who participated in this research seem to concur: video games allow for the creation of shared experiences and, more importantly, for the mutual recuperation of memories and affects from battle.
An older, 52-year-old vet who served in Desert Storm, explained that “shared experiences with gaming partners are the most important thing.” “Playing these battle scenarios put me at ease,” he noted, “but when vets who fought play together, we already share similar emotions and knowledge.” Such affective bonds are revisited and strengthened while sharing an FPS experience, and the design and platforms of such games are ideal for group play. Users wear headphones allowing them to converse with friends who might live across town, or even in another state. Moreover, screen icons—from simple triangular pointers to satellite-like imager—indicate the geographic location of each member of a team of allied soldiers, allowing them to work in concert to carry out the mission.
A Desert Shield Marine veteran, who works driving a United Parcel Service delivery truck, noted that the videos make him “feel something, anything . . . victory, completion, even fear . . . They are an escape.” I reply, “But you said they make you feel things you felt in battle. And you see images meant to simulate war.” “Yeah,” he counters, “but it takes me away from everyday life. The worries. My job stress. Family. Bills.” He adds that the video games are superior to real battle because the skills for success are straight-forward and the players get immediate, usually unambiguous feedback. He and other gamers seems to embody the experience of flow, denoting the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by the feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Activities that create flow will tend to give the users pleasurable experiences (Frostling-Henningsson, 2009, p. 560).
Ben Anderson has generated important insight into the affective “intensities” and “energies” of what many recognize now as a state of “total war,” in which war is unlimited in terms of time and space. It is everywhere and always. Anderson (2010) claimed, “The spaces of ‘total war,’ from the battlefield to the home or trenches, are spaces of affect and this has long been recognized in forms of military thinking” (p. 170). Anticipating the landscape outlined in this essay, he continued, “Morale, though, is unique both because it is born in the emergence of a new dimension of war—‘intense war feeling’ as part of warfare . . . .” Here, according to Anderson, creating and sustaining the morale becomes a strategic, affective practice of military power.
Neoliberalism
As we have seen, war games—simulated on screens and on the highly engineered landscapes of military training bases—are marked by both discursive/ideological and affective technologies, and they are invented and shaped, tested and sold, and purchased and played under the conditions of neoliberal possibility. Within neoliberal structures of everyday life, anything and everything becomes a product to be measured, monitored, marketed, and manipulated for exchange. More precisely, the management of affect, along with desire, pleasure, and excess, drives the MIME-NET machine. The neoliberal management of affect is best considered an outcome of a nonlinear dynamical assemblage of market forces, state biopower, and desiring machines. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explain how desire is central to their notion of assemblage: Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled desire. The rationality, the efficiency, of an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them. (p. 399)
They insist that desire is an (unconscious) impulse to become, or to produce, or even to invent the boundless world. To build machines. To build networks of people and things. These desires seem to emerge from assemblages and also to create them. Desires are assemblages. As such, in contrast to traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, Deleuzian desire is not a reaction to a psychological lack. Lacanian analysis, which Deleuze and Guattari frequently critique, also organizes itself around the “lack.” Indeed, their understanding of desire inspired the metaphor of excess—signifying that this physic and libidinal energy is ultimately an effusive producer, rather than a crutch or a form of psychological compensation.
Hardt and Negri (2000) argue that neoliberalism has emerged as a new form of control, one that is much more fragmented—characterized by “deterritorialized flows” of capital, labor, social relations, and desire—than traditional forms of state power. These deterritorialized, ludic networks are, for them then, a new global, boundless Empire. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peteur (2009), authors of an insightful examination of the MIME-NET, Games of Empire, invoke this concept to claim that video gaming dominates markets, places, and people via “network power” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 167). Moreover, James Der Derian (2009) conducted one of the most grounded ethnographies of the MIME-NET, in which he spent months observing war games on U.S. military bases. This network generates (in both conscious and serendipitous ways) a coordination of capitalist and ideological interests of various institutions. There is slippage in all nodes of the network, and the spaces of the military and of the entertainment industry are so imbricated as to render them at times indistinguishable, as we have seen with war game videos.
Scholars from multiple disciplines have examined the significance of a world increasingly saturated by virtual and televisual images, including perhaps the most prominent of these, Jean Baudrillard (1994), who claimed that the proliferation of imaginary, cyber spaces has “created a gigantic apparatus of simulation which allows us to pass to the act ‘in vitro.’” Having ironically claimed that simulated images are now “more real” (hyperreal) than reality, he adds, “We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real” (Baudrillard, 1994). Others, such as Kellner (1994), Huntemann and Payne (2010), and Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009), have joined Baudrillard in analyzing how virtual games of military conflict employ cyber technology to conflate war and entertainment.
“All but war is simulation” is an intentionally ironic expression commonly heard among military trainers and officers designing simulated field battles (Der Derian, 2009; Lenoir, 2000). The technologies of simulation and cyberwar have actually folded back onto embodied role-playing and military simulations in which soldiers act out (practice) the very tactics of war. Der Derian witnessed a large scale mock battle on a U.S. base in which each participant’s role, tactics, movements, potential injuries, and prisoner of war scenarios were determined by computer technology monitored by war planners and generals who sat in a control room filled with advanced computer monitors. In addition to rifles and standard equipment, the participants carried small laptops fixed to their chests into the battle. These war games range from highly nuanced exercises taking place on land and sea, on military bases, and range from the staging of mock villages 4 to computer simulations of nuclear war. Beyond the boundaries of the military base and real theaters of war, civilians (young and old) are also invited to play embodied, uniformed soldiers, either through military recruitment activities or private companies.
America’s Army, the FPS video played by the aforementioned tanker while resting in a tank, produced by the U.S. Army and available to the public, online, since its release on the fourth of July, 2002. Access to this war game has always been free, since its main purpose was recruitment. To date, America’s Army has been downloaded over 43 million times (Huntemann & Payne, 2010, p. 8), representing the exemplar of the coordinated efforts of the military sectors (merging government and private organizations), the Pentagon, the media, and of course, software technologies. While playing, the online version of this game allows users to link directly to the Army’s recruitment website, <goarmy.com>.
The America’s Army website offers a “Real Heroes” window, in which the battle accomplishments and medals of real soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are featured. A simple click allows users to watch active duty and veteran soldiers discuss their military careers and even their childhood experiences. Experiential realism, turning on embodiment, prevails within this type of war media, and these FPS games and their associated narratives of the soldier’s subjectivities, wherein the show is actually taken on the road. The Army, in particular, has become a brand unto itself, as the Virtual Army Experience (its public relations apparatus) brings military entertainment and education “carnivals” to shopping malls, convention centers, and athletic events through the United States. Such stagings allow young people—even children—to sit in military Humvees while grasping a mounted M4 rifles, peering through its large, computerized scope. Participants get to shoot “real” grenade launchers and fly Black Hawk helicopters, battling simulated enemies on large screens. Such cyber-mediated spaces rely on the software that was employed in America’s Army (Huntemann & Payne, 2010, p. 1).
Military investment in large-scale war simulation technologies has penetrated the design of War Games, or field military exercises, the corporate world of computer technologies, and the Hollywood movie industry. In 1997, in a study titled, Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense, the National Research Council identified the promise of potential alliances between the private computer industry and the Pentagon, in so far as cyber-simulations were concerned. Indeed, the military established DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1996 to capitalize on research coming out of universities and corporations to advance cyber-graphic and simulation technologies.
These projects and their deployments represent, again, the central “lines of flight” that emerge within a neoliberal framework: Put simply, neoliberalism, from the moment of its inception, advocates a programme of deliberate intervention by government in order to encourage particular types of entrepreneurial, competitive and commercial behaviour in its citizens, ultimately arguing for the management of populations with the aim of cultivating the type of individualistic, competitive, acquisitive and entrepreneurial behaviour which the liberal tradition has historically assumed to be the natural condition of civilised humanity, undistorted by government intervention. (Gilbert, 2013, p. 9)
In this framework, then, and among economic theorists more generally, neoliberalism is not merely a political economic strategy advocating a laissez-faire, hands-off approach to markets and banking. It is not merely a doctrine that encourages society to castigate poor people for their failure to value hard work and ingenuity. It is also a political system that works to construct among the citizenry certain kinds of subjectivities and shape moralities and affectivities, and if these are engendered by private as well as government “technologies,” all the better. In other words, neoliberalism is an ideology, one authored by an array of diverse, even seemingly opposed corporate and social interests, that cohere into an assemblage driven by energies, always immanent and emergent, never fully closed or completed.
An affective, neoliberal assemblage is exceedingly comprehensive, as illustrated by the increasing use of FPS war game technology to treat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In describing their gaming participation in terms of a mindless escape, veterans may have been suggesting a sort of dissociative experience, wherein one’s mind, or more precisely one’s brain, achieves a psychocultural, trance-like state, a detached sense of in-between-ness (Walker, 2015). Of course, many mental illnesses and personality disorders are linked to chronic, involuntary states of dissociation, but here, I am interested in the way a prompted state of dissociation might be used for therapeutic purposes.
It seems too perfect a circle that the tentacles of this War game assemblage touch all phases of the life course, beginning with efforts to attract children to (join) the U.S. military enterprise, to providing soldiers in battle with an affect-saturated, cyber leisure experience, to finally emerging as a therapeutic intervention for those veterans suffering emotional wounds caused by their participation in combat. Nonetheless, veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are being treated virtual reality platforms that simulate the combat experience in clinical settings (Rizzo et al., 2015). One approach, briefly, is to progressively expose the soldier to simulations that recreate his or her combat experience—including replicas of the actual places and scenes of battle—and physiological responses are monitoring. As such, this is a form of Exposure Therapy, designed to desensitize the PTSD sufferer via repeated but controlled exposure to the violent events that originally caused the long-lasting psychological harm.
It is perhaps ironic that in this essay, I have argued that neoliberalism is an ideology, even if at times it is marked by very nonlinear effects and flows, while arguing that the neoliberalism is a logic saturated by affect. If the global phenomenon of war video games indeed cultivates an affective sensibility in which embodied cyber war is internalized to produce an understanding of war, on one hand, as a totalizing, banal, if not mindless presence in the lives of all people, and on the other hand, as a pleasurable bonding performance of great ludic intensity, it also obscures the violence of battle, for soldiers and citizens alike. Despite cyber images in which blood splatters on the FPS’s rifle scope (computer screen), players do not finish a game such as Call of Duty pontificating the inhumanity of war. Even near the close of an essay such as this one, committed to highlighting the horrific consequences of war, as featured in FPS games, a reader may feel that the sanitation of battle has been left comfortably in place.
A Multitude of Resistance
I am very poor at playing war video games or any other sort. My children and friends who are military veterans introduced me to these FPS games, and what I know now I learned from the participants in this study. My initial exposure led me to conclude that for most of these games, the protagonist FPS is inoculated against the brutal consequences of battle. Even in the games I watched my participants play, it seemed as though most encounters overlooked such horrors as rape and torture, for example. One of my “key” participants—a small group of research subjects from whom the ethnographer receives particular assistance opening doors and more extensive background briefing—an avid gamer who served as an MP (military police) in Iraq, said that such things: Don’t appear too commonly in our games, but I can think of a number . . . but it’s not the character you play who does these things firsthand but is the victim of, witness to, or tacitly complicit with. In regards to PTSD, you see a few characters these days, mostly as a background characteristic of the player or his companions. (Fieldnotes, March 18, 2018)
He informed me about of the Call of Duty: Black Ops game, in which acts of torture are performed, and the player can command another soldier to hit a prisoner in the face. As producers of these games, such as Activision, seem to be open to creating more realistic and challenging scenarios, the most well-known example seems to be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, in which the player’s commanding officer shoots a Somali prisoner in the head after torturing him.
Beyond an enhanced realism, the purpose for including torture and murder, and sometimes rape, in these newer games is unclear. But more broadly, the hegemony of the MIME-Net assemblage—energized always by desires and affective investments—is not absolute, and Hardt and Negri offered a way to challenge these games and the global landscape of the banal but seductive pleasures of war and terror. They followed Empire with the more optimistic book Multitude, in which the emergence of more mobile and transparent digital-technologies (e.g., increased file-sharing, chat rooms, user-friendly computer code, social media platforms, free and open Internet access) forge a creative commons of global dimension. Within this boundless, constantly emerging cyber-network, a “multitude” of sharing, new alliances, subjectivities, and creations may be designed to disrupt empire by imaging new relationships and assemblages. Within a neoliberal framework, then, in contrast to liberalism, affect cannot be marginalized as a bounded property of the individual, but as an emergent energy of the network of humans, materialisms, signs, objects, and economic landscapes (Massumi, 2015).
One example, among many, is Deviation, a short six-minute and 20-second video, directed by John Griggs, accessible by Internet for free. The imagery and style of the video parallels an FPS war video game, except that fiery battles and dead bodies do not punctuate the story. Instead, soldiers sit around, conversing about the meaning of war and even griping about the logic of battle and the nuisances of soldiering life. A soldier remarks at one point, “Doesn’t it strike you as strange? I mean we keep doing the same things over and over again” (Chien, 2010, p. 241). Deviation is very much the stuff of the commons conceptualized by Hardt and Negri, developed by anonymous Internet users from across the United States in a collective effort. The result was a consciously self-reflective critique of war video games and even of war itself.
The MIME-Net, situated originally within the logic of American hegemony and sustaining itself on capital generated by the U.S. government and western corporations, laid the foundation both for an expanding sense of American empire and a more spontaneous and unpredictable transnational flow of such things as simulated war games. The emergence of FPS games, as well as novels, movies, and collaborative games, that inscribe violence with counter-narratives, is not surprising. It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of such media, as means for undoing empire and re-working neoliberal assemblages. Such interventions are supremely important, in terms of circulating alternative visions and raising consciousness, but their impact on the hegemony of empire is suspect.
Alt-gaming and similar projects designed to realign the power of the MIME-Net are important as one piece among many in an always “incomplete” project of resistance. We seek an experience of daily life no longer punctuated by threat, or by the kind of world described by Massumi (2015) as, “one in which the only certainty is that threat will emerge where it is least expected . . . because what is ever-present is not a particular threat . . . but the potential for still more threats to emerge without warning” (p. 10). Challenging the force of FPS war video games is really a matter of challenging the neoliberal networks of power that use such forms of cyber play to commodify the affects and pleasures of battle and the fear of threat. Even more precisely, however, it is a matter of challenging the diffuse assemblage of Empire’s tentacles and its tendency to justify its hegemony in terms of the ability to make war.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The feedback of Irving Epstein and Robert Rinehart has been invaluable in refining this essay.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: In addition, the Mellon Center at Illinois Wesleyan University provided financial support that was critical to carrying out fieldwork for this project.