FROM SERIAL DEATH TO PROCEDURAL LOVE: A STUDY OF SERIAL CULTURE

By

STEPHANIE BOLUK

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2011

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© 2011 Stephanie Boluk

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For my mum

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the reasons I chose to come to the University of Florida was because of the warmth and collegiality I witnessed the first time I visited the campus. I am grateful to have been a member of such supportive English department. A huge debt of gratitude is owed to my brilliant advisor Terry Harpold and rest of my wonderful committee, Donald Ault, Jack Stenner, and Phil Wegner. To all of my committee: a heartfelt thank you. I would also like to thank all the members of Imagetext, Graduate

Assistants United, and Digital Assembly (and its predecessor Game Studies) for many years of friendship, fun, and collaboration.

To my friends and family, Jean Boluk, Dan Svatek, and the entire LeMieux clan:

Patrick, Steve, Jake, Eileen, and Vince, I would not have finished without their infinite love, support, patience (and proofreading).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES...... 7

INTRODUCTION...... 11

Serial Ancestors...... 13 Serial Labor ...... 15 Serial Biases...... 16 Serial Time and Serial Death ...... 19 Serial Apocalypses ...... 20 Serial Collectives ...... 22 Overview...... 25

BLONDIE AND THE END OF HISTORY ...... 32

The Early Years ...... 34 Typologies...... 37 Queering Blondie ...... 40 Family Affairs ...... 43 Imaginary Communities ...... 44 From Caricature to Character ...... 48 History Returns: The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary ...... 57 The Nuclear Family...... 62

KAWARA, KAWARA MACHINES, AND THE DEATH OF DEATH...... 79

The Early Kawara ...... 83 The Today series ...... 87 History Painting...... 89 Serial Labor ...... 94 I Am Still Alive...... 95 Kawara Machines ...... 97 One Million Years ...... 103 Glacial Time...... 105 Death of Death...... 106

THE SERIAL DATABASE OF HOMESTAR RUNNER...... 120

Serialities...... 121 Serial Biases...... 123 The Literary in Electronic Literature ...... 128 Seriality, the Literary and Database...... 130 Homestar Runner ...... 133

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Metaleptic Relays ...... 137 Database + Narrative...... 139 The Melancholic Database ...... 141

SERIAL DEATH AND THE ZOMBIE: NETWORKED NECRONOMICS...... 149

The History of the Zombie...... 151 Going Viral...... 157 Digital Seriality ...... 165 Left 4 Dead: Serial Killers ...... 168 Left 4 Dead 2...... 175 AI Director...... 177 Serial Killers...... 179 Over Achievers ...... 184 We Have Always Been Zombies...... 189

STATE OF PLAY: PROCEDURAL LOVE AND POLITICAL GAMES...... 195

Making Love ...... 197 Tools of the Trade...... 200 Political Love...... 203 Serial Sex...... 204 Just for Fun...... 207 Serfdom 2.0...... 209 Re-imagining Fun ...... 213

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 223

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...... 231

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1 Blondie, April 2, 1933 ...... 65

2-2 Blondie, May 12, 1933...... 65

2-3 Blondie, May 14, 1933...... 66

2-4 Blondie, December 6, 2004 ...... 66

2-5 Blondie, January 29, 1933...... 67

2-6 Blondie, July 7, 1946 ...... 67

2-7 Blondie, June 6, 1945...... 68

2-8 Blondie, February 27, 1944 ...... 68

2-9 Blondie, November 14, 1937 ...... 69

2-10 Dagwood at the Office (Adelman, 39)...... 70

2-11 Blondie, Sept. 4, 2005 ...... 71

2-12 For Better or Worse, August 28, 2005 ...... 71

2-13 Cover of Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949) ...... 72

2-14 Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 14...... 73

2-15 Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 22...... 74

2-16 Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 23...... 75

2-17 Blondie, February 23, 1947 ...... 76

2-18 Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 23...... 77

2-19 Blondie, July 7, 1946 ...... 78

3-1 Karl Wallenda falls to his death ...... 108

3-2 From On Kawara's Today series, March 22, 1978 ...... 108

3-3 Dump (1954)...... 109

3-4 Drawing #9 from the Bathroom series (1953-4)...... 109

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3-5 Drawing #22 from Events in a Warehouse (1954)...... 110

3-6 The South Artillery Shed housing Donald Judd's sculptures in Marfa, TX...... 111

3-7 Bernd and Hilla Becher's Cooling Towers (1963-73)...... 111

3-8 A date painting created in Mexico...... 112

3-9 Kawara's process (Watkins 76-77) ...... 113

3-10 A telegram from On Kawara addressed to Sol LeWitt ...... 113

3-11 Martin John Callanan's I Am Still Alive (After On Kawara)...... 114

3-12 Screenshot of Martin John Callanan is Okay...... 114

3-13 Screenshot of a Kawara-inspired status update on Twitter...... 115

3-14 A screenshot of a digital date painting from MTAA's onKawara(v2) ...... 115

3-15 A calendar displaying which days images are available for onKawara(v2)...... 116

3-16 Screenshot of the newsfeed in onKawara (v2) for October 26, 2010 ...... 116

3-17 Fredrik DeWilde's Hostage (2010)...... 117

3-18 One Million Years (Past and Future) ...... 118

3-19 An excerpt from a page of One Million Years (Past)...... 119

4-1 Homestar Runner’s main menu (one of over twenty skins) ...... 146

4-2 Homestar Runner’s main cast of characters...... 146

4-3 Cartoons within cartoons: Teen Girl Squad ...... 147

4-4 The “paper” metaleptically serves as menu and character ...... 147

4-5 Strong Bad upgrades his computer ...... 148

4-6 The Tandy 400 haunts Homestar Runner ...... 148

5-1 The writing on the wall in Left 4 Dead 2...... 191

5-2 The movie poster doubles as load screen and also displays the players ...... 191

5-3 Serial death in Left 4 Dead 2 ...... 192

5-4 Jets flying across the highways of New Orleans in Left 4 Dead 2 ...... 192

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5-5 The devastated residential homes of New Orleans ...... 193

5-6 Zombies falling out of buildings, overtaking New Orleans ...... 193

5-7 The "credits" roll at the end of the game...... 194

5-8 Gameplay stats are recorded and made part of a player's permanent record.. 194

6-1 The conflation of human and emergent architecture ...... 221

6-2 The emergent effects of fire on in-game architecture ...... 221

6-3 Some of Steenberg’s homemade tools...... 222

6-4 Screenshots of Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft...... 222

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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

FROM SERIAL DEATH TO PROCEDURAL LOVE A STUDY OF SERIAL CULTURE By

Stephanie Boluk

May 2011

Chair: Terry Harpold Major: English

“From Serial Death to Procedural Love” investigates the concept of seriality—as a narrative, aesthetic, political, economic, and technical construct—via a historical and material analysis of the relationships between a diverse group of cultural objects ranging from newsprint comics to conceptual art, plague writing to computer programming. Through an examination of serial temporality, serial labor, and serial collectives, this study arrives at a working theory of seriality in which mechanical, linear, and industrial forms of repetition shift into contemporary forms of procedural seriality that experiment with possibilities for emergent subjectivities.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

From the shoes on our feet to the recurrent flux of the stock market, we live in a culture in which seriality has become a culturally dominant paradigm. At its most basic level, seriality is what governs those invisible and ubiquitous forms of mass repetition that construct our daily lives. Yet in many respects seriality is the elephant in the room— it is an uncomfortable truth to realize that our personal preferences are not that personal. Our interest and pleasures in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the television shows we watch, and our favorite bands (no matter how obscure) are shared by countless others. And an even more uncomfortable truth, perhaps, is to realize that this lack of essential uniqueness has become a pleasure in and of itself. New cars, new computers, and new iPods sheathed in hard plastic, rubber, and metal are only desirable until the first scratch. With life under late capitalism, the fantasy of uniqueness is wedded to the mass production of the new: a serial paradox.

Seriality is the logic that governs financial crisis. A bank collapses when an individual withdraws all the money from their account unaware (or indifferent) to the fact that hundreds of other account holders are doing the same thing at the same time. If I decide to go to McDonalds and buy a Coke, seriality promises that thousands of other people across the world are making the same purchase, acting from a similar set of circumstances. Causality is flipped, and any personal decision can be understood as inspiring mass change by merit of serial effects. The serial condition is the reason why a vortex of plastic waste and other trash the size of Texas can appear in the center of the

Pacific Ocean. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, we live in a state of exception where

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the exception “has by now become the rule” (9) and life proceeds as an uninterrupted succession of serial crises.

As important and ubiquitous as serial phenomena are, seriality within the humanities remains a relatively under-explored construct. These invisible forms of repetition are equally applicable to media forms as they are to environmental and economic disasters, yet discussions of seriality remain sporadic and scattered across various discourses and disciplines. This is why my dissertation aims to investigate the concept of seriality—as a narrative, aesthetic, political, economic and technical construct—via the study of a diverse group of cultural objects ranging from historic plague writing to computer programming. My study examines the way in which technological and medial forms construct our cultural imaginaries. I interrogate these issues through a historical and material analysis of serial forms, with each chapter analyzing a different medium: print, art, film, animation and video games. I ask why, for example, do rhetorical discourses associated with plague (e.g., histories and narratives traceable back to the earliest texts) mirror serial structures and repetitions as seen in the form of biological epidemic itself? In the case of a daily newspaper strip such as

Blondie (published in a time-sensitive medium yet set in an eternal present), how do you read a serial narrative that has run continuously for over eighty years? And how do contemporary video games and electronic literature incorporate the logic of repetition at the level of narrative, the level of human-computer interaction, and at the level of programming languages themselves? Out of these various discursive contexts, I tie these questions together into a working theory of seriality, founded on three interconnected discussions of serial temporality, serial labor and serial collectives.

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Serial Ancestors

What distinguishes serial forms from other aesthetic objects, whether they be the minimalist cubes of Donald Judd or a newspaper comic, is that they are rooted—in some respects, paradoxically—in the concept of process. Seriality is not a concept limited to a particular historical time, but is deeply tied to commodity culture and the mechanized processes of the industrial revolution. Metaphors of industrialization are often retroactively applied to earlier pre-industrial forms. Walter Ong, for example, in his foundational work Orality and Literacy (1982) describes the oral poet (who operates in a serial form) as “an assembly-line worker” (23). Ong’s description of the poet-worker is an example of the way in which post-industrial culture has retroactively applied this model of seriality in cultural production to the generative poetics of oral bards. These bards transmitted and transformed information via constant cultural refreshes that arose through the retelling of narratives. They did not invent new stories with each repetition but selectively recombined and remixed established phrases from a repertoire inherited from previous poets and their own prior productions. In these terms originality is generally understood as the ability to adapt and recombine preexistent materials. Ong compares orality’s “assembly-line worker” to print culture’s concept of a “creator,” the model of a literary genius who creates ex nihilo (a model which itself is now somewhat obsolete as a result of the rise of digital remix culture).

The conventions of oral culture, while they have been superseded by subsequent chirographic and print culture, have not entirely vanished. Vestiges of these traditions are retained, particularly in serial forms such as popular genre fiction and comics. If we compare those conventions Ong identifies as central to the oral form, it is uncanny how almost all of the characteristics he inventories in Orality and Literacy could be used to

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describe the content of an early superhero comic. Throughout his book Ong notes the different ways oral forms differ from writing and print. Oral storytelling features: characters defined according to external actions and behavior rather than psychological interiority and psychological realism; an emphasis on episodic plot, repetitions, and redundancies rather than unified narrative structures (e.g. the Freitag triangle); and the use of iconic caricatures and heroes. Serial forms are conservative in that they have a tendency to operate within generally-accepted generic conventions, yet they continually respond and adapt to specific needs of their audience or community. Echoing the conventions of oral storytelling, comics have also undergone a slow yet steady transformations based on the feedback between artist and audience. Superhero comics tend to adapt their protagonists to historical shifts in culture, re-writing or retconning their histories in a way that continues to work within the constraints of the genre.

While some of the conditions of orality have been preserved in print, it appears that digital culture has found its own way to return to premodern traditions. This is reflected in an even greater de-emphasis on the concept of the author as well as a transformed model of history. According to Ong: “oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance” (46). While memories are not necessarily forgotten in digital contexts, in many of the digital works I examine, the logic of narrative has been replaced a kind of “database aesthetic” — a serial, episodic approach to storytelling that operates with a continually moving, yet arrested temporality. Wendy

Chun characterizes this phenomenon as the “enduring ephemeral” of the digital. Eyal

Amiram describes a serial temporality that is not unlike Ong’s characterization of oral

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history when he writes in “Electronic Time and the Serials Revolution” that “electronic text powerfully masks its production process in favor of a hypostatic product.”

Serial Labor

My study of seriality theorizes both print and digital forms in terms of this premodern legacy. Serial labor, even in pre-industrial modes, is rhetorically positioned as mechanistic. The storyteller is envisioned as an “assembly-line worker” rather than artistic “creator.” This figure of the artist as factory worker, whether in cartooning, minimal art, philosophy, animation, or video games has persisted with a surprising durability. In the case of serial fiction and procedural art and games, the labor of deeply repetitive and time-intensive processes is not only reflected in their production and distribution, but also in the content of the works I am examining. In serialized media objects, an important dialectic is established between message and medium, between the production, form, and thematic content. My first chapter turns to newspaper archives in order to examine Blondie, whose daily output, generally conceived of as ephemeral and throwaway, has continued for over eighty years—the series proving to be as durable as its individual iterations are expendable. The labor and reproduction represented in the comic itself, the repetition of the same gags revolving around the

Taylorized, nine-to-five rhythm of work and family life, creates an interconnected circuit with the industrial modes of reproduction of the newspaper and the culture of bourgeois capitalism (which it is simultaneously operating within and ideologically enforcing). With newspaper seriality serving as the beginning of the discussion, my analysis moves through other long-term art practices such as On Kawara’s lifetime project of producing monochrome paintings. The temporality of his art-making is wedded to the industrial

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time of the newspaper, as he completes his monochromes within a twenty-four hour time period and always includes a newspaper to accompany his work.

My study culminates with an analysis of serial labor in digital media. Not only is serialized and sequential storytelling restructured in a digital environment, but labor patterns are also reorganized. I examine the labor practices associated with the popular website Homestar Runner and the networked computer game Left 4 Dead in which the boundary between a player’s leisure and labor is unstable. In my final chapter, I move away from the disciplined form of bourgeois familial love that underwrites the newspaper as discussed in the chapter on Blondie to a more distributed notion of what

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed “political love,” exemplified in procedural games such as (the aptly named) Love. In each chapter, I explore the metaleptic relays between content, form and labor governing the works I examine.

Serial Biases

It is perhaps on account of the longstanding bias against seriality, traceable back to the transition from oral to literate culture, that relatively little scholarship on seriality has been undertaken. Victorian serials, for example, were originally intended to be read speedily—glossed over with the distracted attention of a television-watcher (rather than with the focused concentration expected of contemporary English students in the literature classroom). In their moment, these texts were regarded with disdain by elite readers who rejected the populism and affect of serial dramas. From Matthew Arnold's nineteenth-century critique of the addictive properties of serial fiction to the Frankfurt

School’s theory of audience as passive consumers, the serial has been generally infantilized, feminized and devalued. It has been portrayed as lacking aesthetic refinement and formal sophistication. While such distinctions no longer formally exist in

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the humanities, this legacy remains an undercurrent that is present in serial print, film, television, comics and, more recently, digital media.

While my analysis of seriality is focused on issues of labor, temporality, and repetition, the presence of an anti-serial bias can be observed in many traditions. In structuralist narratology, for example, the forced pause between the production and reception of a work is one of the most commonly ignored features of a narrative. It is not only absent in the work of earlier and more literary narratologists (Gérard Genette,

Gerald Prince, Stuart Chatman), but also in those narratologists who emphasize plurimedial and transmedial narratology (Marie-Laure Ryan). It is with irony that we can read Stuart Chatman’s observation: “To a certain point, the physical condition of a book

(or other artifact) does not affect the nature of the aesthetic object fixed by it. David

Copperfield remains David Copperfield whether it is read in an elegant library edition or a dirty, water-stained paperback version” (27). While this claim of the text’s semantic independence from its materiality is highly contestable, Chatman neglects a crucial fact: that Dickens initially published the work as a serialized text before it appeared collected in either elegant hardback or water-stained paperback. And, as many Victorian scholars of material culture have shown, this mode of publication had immense consequences on the aesthetic experience of those readers who consumed Dickens in serialized form.

Whereas the serial form was a way of reaching a working class readership in Dickens' era, the collected version of the novel was reserved for those who could pay more for the pleasure of uninterrupted reading (Haywood 34–38). Chatman’s very choice of text is evidence of how the form of distribution does in fact significantly influence a text’s reception.

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Within fine arts, artists deliberately appropriated the use of serial constructs, industrial materials, and commodity culture as formss of institutional critique precisely because of a critical bias against serial objects. When seriality is engaged philosophically, notably in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960),

Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), and Jean Baudrillard’s System of

Objects (1968), it also carries negatively-charged cultural baggage. Sartre was one of the first philosophers to lay out a political and philosophical definition of seriality. Once again, seriality becomes the reviled term as he opposes it to the more politically fruitful concept of “group formation.” In Sartre’s work seriality is a term that expresses the way in which individuals have no perception of the collectivities to which they belong, no perception of the conditions of anomie and alienation that Sartre saw as the foundation of modern urban life. In an early essay on seriality in modern literature, Fredric Jameson argues that Sartre’s model of seriality applies to the structure of language itself. An industrial, commodity culture has produced an industrialized, commodified language which is “as stripped and eroded as the industrial landscape itself, filled with waste products and industrial poisons, with the slag deposits of old slogans and commercials, of exhausted vocabulary and the exploited, unreplenished sources of popular linguistic invention” (“Seriality in Modern Literature,” 79).

This study gathers together a seemingly disparate set of serial objects to demonstrate a general underlying continuity with respect to the way in which their serial structures govern their production, distribution and reception. What has unexpectedly emerged in this process is an image of the serial as a scapegoat. Historically it has

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been regarded as the underside of the literary (serial fiction), the underside of fine arts and, if not the underside of the digital and biological, its disguised interior.

Serial Time and Serial Death

Because the use of a punctuated, serial temporality places a serial object within the rhythm of human life, it is not uncommon to see artists and authors either engaging with a flight from or turning towards an engagement with death. To place a work within the passage of time, within its quotidian rhythms, is to point towards the inexorable horizon of human mortality. In some cases such as that of On Kawara (whose work is discussed in the third chapter), seriality becomes a way to acknowledge and productively engage this rhythm. In cultural prodictions such as Blondie, the timelessness serves as escapist fantasy. Yet, even in those works in which a serial timelessness is deployed for escapist fantasy, there remains the shadow of our impermanence. As comforting as the fact is that Blondie’s characters do not (after an initial period of development) age, that it has become a multigenerational family-focused and family-run comic strip that naturalizes itself within the present, the strip’s refusal to age is put in a constant tension with the crinkling skin around the mouths, and the memories of those who laugh at its jokes. Similarly, the repetition of a video game like

Left 4 Dead creates a kind of undead temporality, a serial time in which, as the game paradoxically announces upon player death “You are dead, you will be rescued soon.”

And in the case of the serialized website Homestar Runner, its archival compulsion is based on a kind of database melancholy, one in which the fleeting nature of time, childhood, popular culture, and technology are resisted through a serializing gesture.

There is a sense that the website serves as a graveyard of the past, but one which is resuscitated for the present. Death is translated into a serial haunting.

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Serial Apocalypses

Following this concept of deathly recurrence, one could also argue that serial labor gives birth to apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic temporalities. Seriality and apocalypse are intertwined—whether it through the infinite iteration that defines a post-apocalyptic temporality or the serial nature of apocalypse itself. The irony of apocalypse is that this fantasy of the End is constantly recurring. Every age imagines itself to be living at the end of times, yet that end never fully arrives. In a post-nuclear, post-millennial, post-

Y2K, post-9/11 world, we have grown accustomed to the concept of serial, infinitely renewable crises. Writing on the concept of apocalypse in Sense of an Ending (1966),

Frank Kermode proposes that "the End is a figure for [humanity’s] own deaths and suggests that “ends in fiction” also serve the same function (7). Thus, a serial work, with a punctuated series of temporary stops and starts, would be composed of many such

“cathartic discharges” (7), offering an ongoing series of little deaths and apocalypse in miniature.

The serial objects and processes I examine find ways to engage multiple (and sometimes contradictory) orders of temporality. They are simultaneously in and out of rectilinear models of time. According to Kermode, the time order of the novel is one in which objects exist “independent of time and succession although they operate in time and succession” (72). When multiple orders of time are conflated in a medium such as the newspaper comic—which is simultaneously the most time-sensitive and temporally- arrested of forms— a kind of post-apocalyptic temporality is instantiated. In Blondie, the concept of an end has been abolished. The characters are forever out of time since, within the diegesis of the comic, time never runs out. Time never moves forward or backward, but remains in an eternal today: the same morning, in which Dagwood

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collides with the mailman as he rushes from the front door to his waiting carpool; the same evening, in which Dagwood announces to Blondie as they lay in bed that he must rise and make a sandwich, etc.

This form of temporality also resonates with On Kawara’s Today series. Kawara’s

Today series is circumscribed by the time of the newspaper and, like newspaper cartoonists of long-time comic strips, demonstrates a lifetime commitment to a specific form of procedural labor. From cartooning and artmaking practices centered on early twentieth-century industrial technology, I move to multiple registers of apocalyptic time figured in electronic serials and series. By staging a fantasy of undeath, Blondie’s characters turn to, in effect, undead ghouls, and those anxieties of death and mortality the strip was meant to suppress within the comforting fantasy of an eternal nuclear family, return to the surface of the page. While the formulaic repetitions of contemporary

Blondie strips situate the characters within a post-apocalyptic temporality in which each character persists as a kind of zombie, the figure of the zombie itself is typically used to represent not a post, but pre-apocalyptic temporality. The imagining of catastrophe allows us to see not the moment after, but the moment before humanity has been totally destroyed. The zombie text teeters on the edge of apocalypse, never fully crossing over. The proliferation of zombie texts mirrors the plague-like proliferation of the fictional zombie, serially returning us to this moment of the End when we are out of time and outside time.

Zombie films and zombie videogames locate players within a space in-between the serial progress of history and the absolute End. In “The End Begins” Terry Harpold has coined the term “zombie cozy” to describe this transitional temporality. It is a

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terminal time to which the zombie narrative compulsively returns. The serial repetition and return to this threshold is essential to zombie horror videogames (particularly first- person shooters), not only through the multiplication of multiple series and spinoffs, but also in terms of gameplay mechanics. In my study of Left 4 Dead in the fourth chapter, I examine how the player engages in the serial process of killing and dying. The ludological mechanics of the game embrace the logic of zombie temporality as the player’s actions transform her into a figure of the undead—a mirror of the zombie hordes she battles

In utopian (and dystopian) literature, utopia serves to mark the end of history. It is the post-eschatological climax in which all further teleological progress is located within an ellipsis. It represents the “…” that follows the happily (or unhappily) ever after. But my final chapter moves away from the apocalyptic temporality of utopia towards the serial procedurality of what Tom Moylan has termed a “critical utopia.” I examine the ways in which the emergent gameplay and politics of Eskil Steenberg’s Love create an alternate history of games and reimagine what it means to belong to a serial collectivity.

My first chapters are rooted in the industrial logic of the newspaper and the concepts of familial love that reinforce the newspapers mode of production. I end with what Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed “political love,” an emergent form of love directed towards a commons that reimagines the individual’s relationship to distributed social networks from both an economic and cultural perspective.

Serial Collectives

Tied to serial labor and serial temporalities is the notion of collectivity. As Jean-

Paul Sartre, Fredric Jameson, and Benedict Anderson theorize, the notion of collectivity is tied to serial labor and serial temporalities. Their models, however, are constructed

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based on industrial forms of organization which is why, according to Wendy Chun, in a contemporary context it is no longer “imaginary communities” (Anderson), but

“imaginary networks” in which subjects serially locate themselves. According to theorists of the network such as Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Steven Shaviro, and

Sherry Turkle, this is a concept of collectivity dependent on individuation. In this respect, it exemplifies the joining of two counter-narratives of technological progress that have been previously applied to the development of writing. This is best demonstrated through a comparison of Walter Ong with Benedict Anderson’s rhetoric regarding the relationship between the rise of print and subjectivity. As will be discussed further in the third chapter, Anderson proposes that print was harnessed in order to create fictionalized "imagined communities," allowing individuals to psychologically feel connected to strangers spread across both time and space. Anderson’s position contrasts with Ong’s argument that print enhanced the interiority and sense of individuation within the subject through the creation of privacy and private ownership of language as a result of the advancement of writing. Taken together, these two models show the ways in which writing technology served to reinforce how an authorial

Cartesian can only be understood against an expanded network of imagined others.

What I argue is that digital media only serves to both intensify, rather than trouble, these constructs of self and other. Sherry Turkle’s thesis “alone together” typifies the way in which two antinomies of an individuated subjectivity and serial collectivity are inextricably bound within network culture.

Sartre’s early model of seriality, which famously uses the example of the man waiting in line for the bus while reading a newspaper, attempted to theorize the

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attenuated, disenfranchised position that modernity created for urban citizens. Sartre’s serial man may be assigned membership to a series from without, but he does not belong to a group. To break this isolation would mean to transcend a serial existence.

Sartre makes a distinction between “group formation” and seriality, with seriality being regarded as an obstacle to the formation of collectives. Although Sartre wrote over fifty years ago within a different urban landscape, his model of social organization has continuing relevance, particularly as a model for networked forms of organization. I would propose that within network culture, seriality is no longer the obstacle, but rather the precondition for group fusion.

Benedict Anderson also proposes a concept of seriality in Spectres of

Comparisons (1998) which deeply resonates of Sartre’s thinking, although the connection is unacknowledged. His model of “bound” seriality is based on the census and other statistical devices that isolate and count bodies in the process of nation building. Unbound seriality does not tally bodies, but participates equally in the service of an unseen totality. My analysis of digital networks moves both Sartre’s and

Anderson’s discussions of seriality onto digital networks. In my analysis of online videogames, I discuss how serial identities are not configured along national boundaries, but become deterritorialized “states of play” in which informal spontaneous communities generate around the development, distribution and play of videogames.

The figure of the zombie is frequently deployed to pit a group of survivors against a massified, networked version of the fourth horseman. And in my case study of the series Left 4 Dead, the fact that this is a co-operative, team-based game played online further situates the zombie within the logic of the network—the network being the

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necessary precondition that brings life to the living dead. Whereas Blondie and the work of On Kawara represent a moment in time when nation building was still largely contingent on what Anderson calls print capitalism, these digital networks imagine a different set of economic and social possibilities in what Jay David Bolter has termed

“the late age of print.”

Overview

In the following five chapters I weave together the interrelated operations of serial temporality, serial labor, and serial collectives. My second chapter examines how time and history operate in Blondie, one of the longest running and widely syndicated comic strips. Turning to newspaper archives in order to provide a counter-narrative to the development of the strip, my research redresses the historical amnesia surrounding

Blondie by specifically resituating it in its historical, diegetic, and medial contexts. I argue that the current Blondie exists in a kind of post-apocalyptic temporality—an end of history in the form of an eternal present that naturalizes its depiction of suburban, coupled heteronormativity. Through an examination of archival newspaper strips, I further argue that the frozen landscape of Blondie becomes a containment unit for pervasive post-war atomic anxieties. The nuclear family is wedded to nuclear energy in a doubled act of suppression, preserving not only against atomic energy’s destructive effects, but the possibility for revolutionary social transformation.

My third chapter examines serial temporality via the lifelong conceptual art practices of Japanese artist On Kawara. In 1921, Rodchenko painted Pure Red Color,

Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color to announce the “death of painting.” In his essay on On Kawara’s Today series (1966-present), Jeff Wall proposes that the time has arrived to think of the “death of the death of painting.” This chapter suggests that

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the death of painting and even the death of the death of painting in Kawara’s work, can be thought in terms of the more basic term: the absolute horizon of death. In Kawara’s

Today series as well as One Million Years (1999), fittingly, we see both death and the death of death: human death, individual and collective, becomes a vanishing point within a serialized, geological time. Nevertheless, in this moment of death’s erasure—of death’s death—we confront the negativity of death as a powerful positive inscription.

This is reflected also in Kawara’s series of telegraphs from the seventies, I Am Still

Alive, which play with the staccato rhetoric and gap between sending and receiving of the telegram. The delay of the telegram is deployed to send a doubled message about life and death.

Kawara attempts to think outside of the constructs of life and death, to think in terms of machinic and geological time—the effects of these gestures are deeply humbling and de-anthropomorphizing. Yet there is always a troubled and intractable remainder that circumscribes Kawara’s artworks, temporally and historically, within the realm of the human. Like Blondie, Kawara’s Today series is simultaneously wedded to the temporal order of the newspaper and it is locked in the logic of today. I will examine the relationship between his practice and contemporary industrial technologies as well as the way in which Kawara’s art has been appropriated by digital artists to a very different effect.

Having undertaken an analysis of serial practices rooted in the materiality and temporality of the newspaper, I transition into an exploration of digital seriality in the subsequent chapters. My fourth chapter investigates the way in which contemporary concepts of the literary and emergent forms of database aesthetics intersect with each

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other in digital fiction. Using Mike and Matt Chapman’s online cartoon Homestar Runner as the central case study, I provide a survey of issues surrounding the literary, database and serial fiction and the way they figure in the Flash website Homestar Runner. I will then trace the propensity of electronic literature for what has been described as a technologically-conditioned melancholia and relate this to the serial constructs within

Homestar Runner. I argue that the website acts as a kind of graveyard, or nostalgic reliquary, absorbing obsolescent media and cultural forms into an ever-expanding melancholy machine.

The archival impulse, as seen in both the organization of the website and the content of its time-based media, inevitably engages in a process of erasure. It is as much an impermanence agent, to borrow Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s coinage, as it is a database. The website transforms with every update. This twofold act of adding and erasing is reflected in the content of the animations—which uses its characters are vehicles for remediating obsolescent media and culture. We are presented with essentially a serial graveyard, but one in which the very act of archiving results in the loss of historicity. This nonlinear aggregation of media objects ultimately reshapes the kinds of narrative threads that occur—intertextual, episodic references substitute for linear plot forming a larger meta-narrative that is implied rather than explicated. The narrative must be weaved together (often collectively through wikis) through the collaboration of savvy, long-term readers.

My fourth chapter continues to examine serial constructs in digital media by examining the figure of the zombie as a metaphor for the kind of undead repetitions that characterize digital data. The zombie in print and graphic fiction, film, and new media is

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an amazingly versatile cipher. It is a liminal, uncanny figure capable of absorbing whatever cultural anxiety it is harnessed to express. The zombie can be queer, abject, subaltern, racialized, gendered, and lumpen. It is, moreover, culturally viral in the contemporary moment, proliferating in hundreds of films, games, comics, books, websites and subcultural practices. It is possible to identify the zombie into three broadly historical categories—the Haitian, the Romero, and what I propose to call the digital zombie, a pathological as opposed to supernatural figure. This chapter will examine the serial logic of the zombie, its connection not only to Haitian folklore and the

“serial” in film history, but also, just as significantly, its relationship to a longer and older history of plague and plague writing (also a deeply serial phenomenon). The seriality of the zombie is not simply a matter of proliferating remakes and sequels, but it functions as a biopolitical construct based around the logic of the virus (another serial operation).

After a discussion of the seriality of the zombie, I will turn specifically to the second video game in Valve’s Left 4 Dead series, set in Louisiana. In opposition to a more typical videogame aesthetic of immersive realism, the player of Left 4 Dead engages in an explicitly filmic realism that positions the game within the conventions and history of cinema. The player travels through Louisiana landscapes, through flooded houses and swamps with New Orleans as final destination. The imagery unmistakably borrows from post-Katrina landscapes. Those victims of the ninth ward and surrounding area, the disenfranchised who before Katrina lived in a state of what

African-American studies scholars describe as “social death,” were literally left for dead in 2005. I will examine this political context in conjunction with those ludic aspects of

Left 4 Dead that align the player with zombie subjectivity, enacted within the game’s

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vast collective network of “social undeaths.” Left 4 Dead establishes a kind of player- zombie body (not necessarily the body of the actual player) via a set of pathological algorithms. This is accomplished specifically by gameplay that takes the form of a zombie-player assemblage. This is also a result of AI Director, a procedural environmental engine that controls resources and zombie swarms based on your in- game performance and other actions. It “directs” the movements of the gamer in-game

(as well as visual and musical cues to simulate a more filmic experience). In this respect, AI Director is the new Bela Lugosi (the first zombie master from 1932’s White

Zombie): what was once a human puppet master turning bodies into machines is now integral to the machinery of the game, closing the circle of undead labor, an analytic death machine constructing and constructed by serialized bodies.

My final chapter moves away from the mechanical repetitions of serial death towards a call for serial love. This chapter will examine a new genre of procedural games in which the interplay of serialized systems of simulation working together with the player produce spontaneous, dynamic and unique play. In a sandbox game, nobody knows what will happen. (For example, if one procedural system simulates fire and the other wind, combining the two could accidentally produce forest fires without the intent of either player or designer.) These dynamics are traditionally categorized as emergent game design. Looking specifically at Eskil Steenberg’s Love, I examine how procedural gameplay mirrors the assemblages of designer/player communities surrounding these projects shaped by what can be regarded, following Hardt and Negri’s model, as a form of political love. Procedural games generate emergent gameplay which simultaneously offers a kind of political emergence arising from the production, distribution and play of

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these games. Steenberg’s Love epitomizes this logic in that he has not only designed a procedural “(not so) massively multi-player” online game with the help of a small community of players-cum-programmers, but he also designed the very tools and software he used to build the game which he then opensourced to the community, thus distancing the game and authorship even further from the reigning economy of proprietary software. Love (as well as other games that engage in procedurally- generated world building) are serially produced and distributed. The players pay to see the game through alpha and beta-versions, simultaneously removing the necessity of paid user testers and keeping the community invested in monitoring updates and developments in the game. Love, like other procedural games such as Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, signals a transition from massively-multiplayer online games to massively-multiproducer online games. Here, play becomes production; not only is the kind of play these procedurally generated worlds offer a simulation of labor

(terraforming, mining, farming, settlement building, and even programming), but it is actual labor, offered by players out of commitment to Steenberg’s project of re- imagining the potential of online videogames. These procedural games are attended by a vigorous forum culture in which players can participate to assist with the development of the game, offering advice on mechanics, management, and marketing. The result is a kind of spontaneous city-state of play, within which the game programmer serves as leader over a community of players dedicated to a virtual pseudo-public space.

Thus from serial death I conclude with a kind of procedural love—a form of seriality which is not locked into undead forms of mechanical repetition but operates, conversely, within a media ecology that allows for emergent forms of gameplay and

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social organization. I entered graduate school around 2005, when Web 2.0 was first emerging and YouTube, Facebook, and World of Warcraft were emerging as the latest competitors on the global market. It was in this context that I began to observe that serial formations that were once invisible—those formations that Sartre had observed and critiqued over thirty-five years ago—were now being made visible.

The ability to track and visualize serial phenomena in digital media, to see the way we as individuals exist with the same paradoxes that define wave-particle duality, is simultaneously impressive and terrifying. While data tracking and visualization are the perfect instruments of big business (it is not a coincidence that seriality has such deep ties to the logic of the commodity), there still remains (at least for now) a place for alternative voices. A place for love.

I am writing these concluding remarks while being interrupted by a Twitter stream of news from #egypt, one of the most dramatic Internet-fueled revolutions to date. Mere months ago, Julian Assange unleashed wikigate with the release of hundreds of thousands of classified documents. The digital objects I examine in this dissertation are not important in themselves, but as ideas—they work within their serial forms in order to experiment and offer a horizon of alternative futures (and alternative histories). They imagine a future in which, despite the incredibly powerful, networked protocols of control, it is still possible to change the tides of the serializing forces that surround us and redirect them towards the formation of new forms of collective commons and agency.

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CHAPTER 2 BLONDIE AND THE END OF HISTORY

Is it easier to confect a utopia than an apocalypse?

—E.M. Cioran, History and Utopia

At the 2005 Comics Conference at the University of Florida, I co-curated an exhibit

of Blondie comics from the newspaper’s weekly Sunday Supplement.1 It was Blondie’s

seventy-fifth anniversary and the Special and Area Studies collections of the George A.

Smathers Libraries contains a substantial archive of the Sunday strips spanning the

1930s–1970s. At that point, there had never been an attempt to systematically collect

Blondie in any chronological or historical way (there is currently an anthology that has

recently been published this year which gathers the first three years of the comic strip).

Up until this publication, all but a few select events such as Blondie’s marriage in 1933

and her going to work in 1991 were excluded from official accounts of Blondie’s history.

The creators of the strip in each era updated the comic through a process of

programmatic forgetting.

What became clear as we curated the exhibit was that, short of a couple pages in

Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride and a few other passing references, there has

been very little serious scholarship on Blondie.2 While the ephemerality and

superficiality of the strip partially offer an explanation for scholarly disinterest, this over

eighty year-old serial clearly warrants a critical analysis to examine how such a

1 For the online brochure see: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/belknap/comics/comics.htm

2 His two-page essay in The Mechanical Bride represents one of the most sustained critiques of the strip. McLuhan focuses primarily on the depiction of Dagwood as the modern industrial man, as the man in the gray flannel suit perpetually emasculated and beaten down by the trials of both home and work life. McLuhan’s brief analysis is pithy and astute, but restricted to an analysis of the content of Blondie. He does not discuss how the strip is implicated within the very structure of these media of mass reproduction he is undertaking to analyze in his search for “industrial man.”

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temporally sprawling work (and one specifically invested in the logic of repetition used to construct an image of modern work and family life), functions from a narratological, historical, and material perspective.

Contemporary Blondie strips, in keeping with standard comic strip conventions, are situated in an eternal present. The temporally arrested, non-place in which the

Bumsteads live could be read as a kind of utopian (or as I will later argue, post- apocalyptic) narrative. If, as Fredric Jameson argues in Archaeologies of the Future,

"the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively," (xiii) what can we say about those that do not quit? If a critical utopia serves “the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment," (xiii) it would appear the success of Blondie is based on having accomplished the exact opposite. Having modeled a serial, yet static end of history in the form of a suburban idyll, the strip provides comforting assurance that it will persist across multiple generations. In History and Utopia, E.M. Cioran describes the nightmare of a "perfect city" in which "all conflict would cease; human wills would be throttled, mollified, or rendered miraculously convergent; there would reign only unity, without the ingredient of chance or contradiction” (87). What has proven durable about the narrative engine of Blondie is that conflict does not cease, but rather it is contained, never exceeding a threshold that would effect any authentic formal or narrative revolution. The domestic squabbles and the innumerable times Dagwood is fired at the caprice of his boss do not alter the basic diegetic architecture of Blondie. With its cartoon conceit of contained crisis, it exemplifies the notion that capitalism succeeds by effectively concealing the deeper condition of crisis and alienation upon which the system depends. Tellingly, one recent

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exception to narrative stasis was Blondie’s entrance into the workforce when she opened up a catering business with her neighbor Tootsie. This made national news as the homemaking skills Blondie had honed for fifty-eight years (as a newlywed, her ineptness at cooking was a source of comedy), were, under the banner of feminist progress, validated when subsumed by the logic of capital and wage labor.3

Although the comic in its earliest instance existed within a forward-moving narrative (and Blondie and Dagwood represented the vanguard of modern marriage), its current form offers a distilled model of the end of history, a symptom of the postmodern condition that Jameson famously describes late capitalism projecting onto culture. He likens the contemporary loss of historicity to the schizophrenic’s experience of life as a

“a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (27). In this chapter, I revisit the early

Blondie strips to examine neglected historical, legal and material contexts of its production. I discuss how these aspects interlock with the representation of labor and family (or production and reproduction) that emerges out of one of the longest—and still very widely syndicated—comic strips.

The Early Years

Created by Murat “Chic” Young and published under William Randolph Hearst’s

King Features Syndicate, Blondie’s first strip appeared on September 8, 1930, at the end of the Jazz Age and the onset of the Great Depression. It was initially intended as

3 In a Washington Post article by David Hinckley, Greg Howard, cartoonist of Sally Forth, remarked on the difficulty of introducing change in comics strip: "Readers like to see sameness in comic strips. It may be the one place in the paper they can. And in that sense, it may be easier to introduce new characters than to alter old ones" (D4). This resistance to the change which took the strip from the "'50s to the '90s in one fell swoop” (D4) was reflected in the uncharacteristic aggression and sexism with which Dagwood initially responded to Blondie’s plan to work when in the strip for September 15, 1991, he throws a tantrum declaring “the wife of Dagwood Bumstead will never work! Never! Never! Never!”

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Chic Young’s latest take on the popular genre of the pretty girl strip.4 Blondie was his

fourth attempt at a working girl comic, having previously drawn The Affairs of Jane

(1921-1922), Beautiful Babs (1923) and Dumb Dora (1924-1935).5 The Depression,

however, drastically altered the tastes of newspaper audiences. In the face of massive

financial crisis, it is not surprising that readers became unreceptive to the adventures of

a ditzy, gold-digging flapper named Blondie Boopadoop. Within the first few years of

publishing Blondie, its popularity flagged. In an attempt to salvage the strip, Young

decided to marry Blondie off, producing an extended courtship between Blondie and

Dagwood Bumstead, one of her many suitors. At the time, Dagwood was portrayed as a

philandering playboy. Blondie and Dagwood’s marriage was the catalyst that allowed

Young to overhaul the premise of the strip and redirect his skilled sense of comic timing

and gifts for slapstick humor towards more socially relevant scenarios. In a climate of

historical economic crisis, Young jettisoned Dagwood’s wealthy parents by having them

disinherit the young couple, thus thrusting them into the workaday struggles of the

middle class. In doing so, Blondie was lifted out of her working class social station and

Dagwood plummeted from his position amongst the financial elite.

The strip’s focus prior to their wedding in 1933 was a more polarized form of class

conflict. Blondie was a working girl while Dagwood was the son of the multi-millionaire

railway tycoon, J. Bolling Bumstead (Figure 2-1). Like most of the daily strips at the

time, Young’s early work on Blondie is populist in tone as he takes every opportunity to

4 Currently the modern reader must consult newspaper archives if she wishes to access most of Young’s work.

5 Cheesecake strips such as Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals (1912–1958) flourished in the twenties as multiple artists created strips featuring young, fashionable, working class flappers such as Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner (1920–1996) and Tillie the Toiler (1921-1959).

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mock the pompously rich. Early Blondie portrays Blondie as a ditzy blonde with a

revolving door of suitors. One of these was the recurring character Hiho, her ne’er-do-

well companion. Hopelessly in love with Blondie, Hiho was Dagwood’s slightly shorter

visual predecessor (and rival). Young initially tried to keep Hiho in the strip after Blondie

and Dagwood celebrated their nuptials, by marrying Hiho to another character named

Betty. Hiho and Betty’s tumultuous, often violent romance bordering on what today

many would consider domestic abuse, contrasted with the marital harmony of Blondie

and Dagwood (Figure 2-2). Unsurprisingly, Hiho and Betty did not remain in the

storyline for very long. In their place, Herb and Tootsie Woodley were eventually

installed as their neighbors and best friends. That Hiho serves as a discomfiting

reminder of Blondie’s checkered past can be seen in the fact that almost all trace of his

presence in the strip has been erased from the official histories of the comic strip.6 The few historical accounts and collections of Blondie currently available avoid placing emphasis on early Blondie’s comic vitality and carnivalesque behavior as she now serves as the stable center of the Bumstead household. In contrast, when Blondie was still a working class secretary living with her mother, she was not above gender- inverting performances such as cross-dressing, albeit always contained within the generic boundaries of romantic comedy in which a character dons drag in the service of heterosexual union (Figure 2-3).

With Young’s inversion of the rags to riches motif the newlywed Bumsteads would join millions of struggling families in the U.S. during the thirties. After the couple’s

6 Hiho is nowhere to be seen in either the 1958 or 2007 collections of Blondie. See Chic Young, 25 Years with Blondie: A Silver Anniversary (1958) and Dean Young and Melena Ryzik, Blondie: The Bumstead Family History (2007).

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marriage, Blondie’s role as zany comic relief receded and she was supplanted by

Dagwood as the primary engine of the strip’s formulaic comedy. Thus, Blondie and

Dagwood fall under the trope of the boob and the bombshell (Betty Boop and Bimbo as

well as Tillie and Mac were contemporaneous cartoon couples in this style). These male

characters starkly contrasted with the square jaws and aquiline noses of more heroic,

stalwart figures, such as Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers who competed for

space on the newspaper pages. Dagwood becomes by way of this transition the

perennially frustrated and ineffectual patriarch through whom Young excelled at creating

an idealized, but contained dysfunctionality—there is enough chaos and conflict to

produce screwball humor, but this is not so excessive as to produce pathos. Young

uses his comic timing and sense of the absurd to contain and defuse the strip’s potential

demonstrations of the contradictions of capitalism and modern domestic relations. The

strip points out cracks in the American Dream only in order to further reinforce its

political-economic and familial foundations.

Typologies

Alexander “Baby Dumpling” Bumstead was born on April 15, 1934. A daughter,

Cookie, followed seven years later. 7 Initially, the children aged in a sort of accelerated

real time, until Young realized that “suddenly I saw that I was going to grow myself out

of a strip," and halted the development of the characters (Zinsser 63). Thus, Young

aged the characters until adolescence and then suspended any further development.

Thus, the world of the strip becomes the extension of the ellipsis in “they lived

happily ever after…” once Young removed his characters from the march of time.

7 To commemorate the birth, King Features announced a national competition offering a $100 prize for the best female name.

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Blondie naturalizes this particular image of the family as universal and outside of forward-moving temporality. Dagwood and Blondie remain physically unchanged and their children, Alexander and Cookie, are disturbingly identical replicas of the parents

(Figure 2-4). While Blondie’s nostalgically-tinted image of contemporary middle class family life is technically set in the present (we see the introduction of cell phones and flat screens), in many ways it affectively remains in a strangely proleptic, but at the same time imaginatively contained fifties, coinciding with the era in which Young froze the strip.

As Blondie remains in this temporally arrested suburban utopia, it is difficult to construct an overarching sense of narrative futurity. This is why the visual doubling works to inscribe a sense of the future into the comic strip. The visual symmetry metaphorically affirms the logic of reproduction. But this is not a perfect repetition. As

McLuhan observes, “[Dagwood] is a joke which his children thoroughly understand. He has failed, but Alexander will succeed” (68). The children, in keeping with the dominant ideological goal of the strip, assure us, following Louis Althusser, that the “the reproduction of the relations of production” (170) will be perpetuated in some forever- postponed future. Alexander and Cookie are in this respect the imaginary inheritors of the ideological structures being shaped by print capitalism.

In Lee Edelman’s book No Future he coins the phrase “reproductive futurism” to discuss how the figure of the Child (not actual, historically contingent children) shapes the ideological terrain of late modern political discourse: “The Child is the “perpetual horizon” and “has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11). Cookie and

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Alexander function precisely as these liminal figures. On the threshold of adulthood, they are intelligent and well-adjusted. Yet despite their fully-matured bodies—they resemble more their parents’ younger brother and sister than their children—they remain forever fixed in this position of the Child. They stand as the affirmation that this system has the capacity to replicate in perpetuity. Just as Blondie and Dagwood remain improbably youthful, their offspring remain nearly adult, emergent mirror images of their father and mother.

While typologies in the comic strip may have been employed for reasons of convenience and economy as a seven days/week production schedule invites cartoonists to take graphic short cuts, the repetition of visual iconography also establishes a telling associative logic. If the children are positioned as a sort of insurance policy that guarantees the continuation of social order and a horizon of the future, there is a conspicuous absence in this scheme of a role for grandparents and, by extension, for historical consciousness that might be associated with them.8 The removal of Blondie and Dagwood’s parents coincides with Dagwood’s transition to the office workforce. The autocratic and blusterous J. Bolling Bumstead is the visual ancestor of the autocratic and blusterous Mr. Dithers (Figure 2-5, Figure 2-6). The figure of the pater familias is restructured such that it is no longer the ties of kinship, but of labor which dictate this new familial hierarchy. Decades later, relocating Blondie’s labor from the home into the workforce would mirror this process.

8 Not all long-running domestic strips have so narrow a notion of the integral family. Perhaps this is due to the Bumstead family being formed at the onset of the nuclear era (relevant, as we will see, in both senses of the term) between the thirties and sixties. Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (1918–present) and Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse (1979–present) or even, for that matter, Bill Keane’s Family Circus (1960– present), are notable in their depiction of extended family members. In Family Circus, the dead grandfather appears watching over the family as a ghostly apparition.

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This reproduction of the relations of production—or a constraining of production so that it anticipates more of the same—carries over into other familiar registers of the strip

In the early years, the family dog Daisy has a litter of five visually identical puppies

(Figure 2-7). The puppies are eventually written out of the strip as Daisy’s unruly reproductivity exceeded the disciplined kinship structures of the nuclear family. With

Daisy’s puppies excised and the older generation having been subsumed into the figure of the boss and his wife, reproductive futurism is shored up entirely in the service of capital. (Even more improbably than her human kin, Daisy has remained forever young: dog-years in Blondie are as detemporalized as human years.)

Queering Blondie

After marrying, Dagwood settles into a routine playing the part of the bumbling husband, raging against the soft tyrannies of boss and wife. Strikingly, Blondie is the fantasy of the funny pages and yet, Dagwood appears to express remarkably little sexual interest in her.9 The sexually neutered nature of Dagwood’s relationship with

Blondie throws into relief his principle appetitive trait: binge eating. The rapaciousness of his craving for food seems to be as large as his sexual libido is diminished. This oral link between lust and hunger seems to have been inaugurated at the very beginning of the courtship, when Dagwood goes on a twenty-eight day hunger strike in order to convince his family to permit his marriage to Blondie. Once his parents yield and allow the marriage to go forward, Dagwood's thoughts do not immediately turn to Blondie, but to food. Early on in the strip’s publication history, Blondie and Dagwood are depicted

9 This apparent frigidity in the marriage was a product of the censors’ influences as well as a way of offering a guarded fantasy of identification for readers: even someone like Dagwood could have a woman like Blondie; readers—males and female—were free to take voyeuristic pleasure in the strip’s obvious showcasing of her body.

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sleeping in the same bed—a fact of marriage uncommon in popular media until the

1970s—implying a physical intimacy off the page. The fungible desires of lust and

hunger would continue to be linked as Dagwood is often was drawn getting out of bed,

Blondie at his side in a revealing negligée —in order to satisfy night cravings for

Dagwood’s famous towering sandwiches, food figuring suspiciously as surrogate for

unfigured sexual activity (Figure 2-8).10

Chic Young’s Colonel Pottersby and the Duchess is a rarely discussed topper11 to

Blondie. It ran for over thirty years (1935–1963) and was a mostly wordless slapstick comic featuring two elderly, high-spirited characters who enjoy pursuing sexual conquests almost as much as they enjoy pursuing (and frustrating) each other (Figure

2-9). The colonel is somewhat effeminized with a rotund body and dainty, tapered feet.

Frequently depicted in undergarments, he engages in activities such as cooking and wooing. The Duchess, on the other hand, is an extremely strong, agile and confident tomboy who excels at athletics and devising clever tricks to irritate the colonel. She is taller than the colonel and sports telltale big feet, which in addition to the phallic overtones the feet carry in this particular context, are the classic visual icon of cartoon slapstick.

The more overt, polyvalent sexuality of the topper functions in these contexts as the queer “remainder” (24) to Blondie that Edelman discusses in No Future. No procreation can possibly emerge from the lusty escapades of the two aged characters,

10 Moreover, it is impossible to ignore the erotic connotations of the totemic submarine sandwiches. Dagwood simultaneously builds and consumes these excessively long and tall sandwiches that operate as a composite figure of a phallic-feminine sex.

11 The topper was usually a small strip drawn by the same artist of a popular series which appeared at the top or bottom of the comic and could be adjusted or omitted depending on the size, formatting and advertising needs of the journal.

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whose prestigious titles intensify their comic absurdity through the juxtaposition of social

status with burlesque behavior. The leisure they are afforded (through age and wealth)

to engage in these escapades contrasts to middle-class values and activities depicted in

Blondie; these two unruly characters with a lust for life literally exist on the margins of

the more normatively-disciplined Blondie. Yet the physical proximity of the two strips for

nearly three decades binds both the heteronormative fantasy of Blondie to the

jouissance of The Colonel and the Duchess. It is perhaps no coincidence that the

striking sexlessness of Blondie, despite the titillating images of Blondie’s

voluptuousness, are connected to a secondary strip centered around two such libidinally

charged characters. While sexuality may be sublimated into food in the main comic

strip, the topper is the site to which these bawdy desires is cathected.

Another paratextual outlet for libidinal energies generated by Blondie was the

creation of Tijuana Bibles inspired by the couple (Figure 2-10). These unofficial and

anonymously made comic books, often seen as the precursors to modern underground

and alternative comics, frequently reappropriated popular comic strip characters,

redrawing them in frankly pornographic situations.12 Contrary to what one might expect,

it is not Blondie who is the principal actor in these comics, but Dagwood. One comic, for

example, is titled “Dagwood” and depicts Dagwood at his office having adulterous sex

with fellow female employees. Blondie only appears in one panel, upon Dagwood’s

return home. Strangely detached from his wife’s allure once again, he is seemingly

oblivious to the fact that she is naked and in the company of a door to door salesman,

confirming McLuhan’s description of Dagwood as a “supernumerary tooth with weak

12 Michael Dowers’s series of Tijuana Bibles: America’s Forgotten Comic Strips, Vol 1-9 gathers an impressive collection of these comic strips.

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hams and a cuckold hair-do” (68). The pornographic appropriation of the Bumsteads’ family dynamic return the repressed sexuality of the comic strip as well as actively undermine its insistence on a stable narrative of work and family. What is notable is that, echoing the official comic strip’s displacement of sexuality, sex is here imagined as being separate from Blondie and Dagwood’s marriage: as they are shown both having multiple sex partners—perhaps without one another’s knowledge. The Tijuana Bible version only confirms that, within the marriage, libido is fixated on other objects and aims.

Family Affairs

Blondie initially circulates in an era in which, as Brian Walker has written, “‘blood and thunder’ strips were competing for space with the previously dominant ‘big-foot’ humor genre (123). Interestingly, both Dean Young and his brother, Lyman Young, were successful cartoonists who carved out a space for themselves within two dominant genres of the era, the family and the adventure comic strips. Lyman Young was a newspaper cartoonist, best known for the creation of another long-running series, Tim

Tyler’s Luck (1928–1996) which in its early years appeared on the same page as

Blondie. Chic Young drew Blondie until his death in 1973, and was succeeded by his son Dean.13 After apprenticing under his father, Lyman Young’s son Bob also assumed control took over Tim Tyler’s Luck in 1984. (He did not have the same success managing the strip as Dean; Tim Tyler’s Luck strip was discontinued in the nineties.).

Dean Young’s daughter, Dana, will replace him when he retires, thus continuing the family legacy of one of America’s oldest cartoon families.

13 Dean Young’s daughter Dana will replace him when he retires, thus continuing the family legacy.

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Tim Tyler’s Luck depicted the on-going adventures of orphaned Tim Tyler and his older friend and fellow orphan Spud. After leaving the orphanage, the boys’ travels take them to Africa, where they join the Ivory Patrol and engage in typical colonial activities that defined the jungle comics and serial film genre (fighting poachers, encountering cannibals, etc.). Jeffery P. Dennis has argued that Tim Tyler’s Luck offers one of the more egregious examples of “homoromance” in an era prior to what he calls post-1940s

“hetero-mania” (2). In this cultural moment, sexual ties to women were either depicted as effeminizing or a nuisance and obstructions to bonds between young, insistently masculine men. Overt sensuality and heterosexuality in young men was treated as a form of social deviancy, while same-sex love and desire (albeit expressed only through platonic devotion) was considered the most acceptable outlet. As Dennis writes:

Between 1900 and 1940, many, perhaps most Boys Next Door, Lost Boys and Adventure Boys fell in love with each other. They were not merely best friends: They shared more emotional intensity than that of the truest of true- blue chums; more physical intimacy than any stage convention or cultural norm allowed for the expression of mere camaraderie. (13)

Dennis locates a shift in popular culture towards the girl-obsessed male teenager in the late 1930s, which historically coincides with Chic Young’s transition towards the domestic strip and the increase in popularity of the genre as a whole. Dagwood’s emasculation, however, carries the traces of this homosocial legacy in popular culture.

Imaginary Communities

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities argues that the rise of the concept of the nation and national identity occurred in tandem with what he terms “print capitalism.”

Understanding print capitalism as the material culture surrounding newspapers and the novel, Anderson suggests that these emergent media forms offered new ways in which literate individuals could conceive of their relations to group formations. He famously

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offers the definition of nation as an “imagined political community”: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow- members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). This imagined community is founded on a particular order of time, what Anderson calls, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, “empty, homogenous time” (24).

With this sense of time measured by “clock and calendar” (24) readers could conceive of events across the world— more particularly, within the expanse of the nation—as happening simultaneously. The new, standardized political discourse for speaking of collective identity in this general temporality brought about a sense of living in a world structured according to a temporalized category of nationhood.

Although Anderson looks at the way in which the newspaper serves to create imagined communities, he never looks closely at specific imaginary communities—the comic strips— whose genesis is inextricably linked to the material conditions of print capitalism and to the newspaper. Developing the concept of imaginary communities in relation to utopia, Philip Wegner articulates the crucial dialectic that occurs between the imagined nation and imaginary narratives arguing that imaginary communities “are real

… in that they have material, pedagogical, and ultimately political effects” (xvi). The comics communities depicted in newspapers offer powerful iconographic images spatially linked to the far less utopian journalistic reports of the nation’s daily news.

Echoing Wegner, M. David Westbrook has argued in his hypertext essay:

The comic strip was born in the Sunday comic supplements of "yellow" or sensationalist newspapers like William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. It existed in part to help these papers sell their most valuable commodity: a window onto the city that could provide a sense of community.

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The impulse to establish an imagined sense of community amongst readers is why comic strip characters were initially conceived as social types, as opposed to individualized characters with possibly unique habits and affiliations. They were embedded in a form whose purpose was to reflect the image of the nation back on itself.

As will be discussed later, the economics of mass reproduction were crucial to this reflection, as they would prompt significant transformations within this emergent medium and its role in national identity-making.

In the early history of newspaper strips, the convention of fixed, sequential panels that artists would “fill” with content on a daily basis was not yet established. The development of this visual convention spatializes the newspaper’s homogenous, empty time. The more ordered reading practices in which comic strips moved from left to right across a series of distinct frames is part of a larger pattern of what Westbrook views as the disciplining of comic strips. The urban rowdiness and irreverence of strips in early comics such as The Yellow Kid was enforced by the formal qualities of images that relied on chaotic, unfocused crowd scenes, in which the eye wandered across cityscapes figuring a loose, multivalent flow of time. In contrast, the emergence of fixed, sequential panels structurally enacts a movement to contain the transgressive potential of the strips. They become, in effect, Taylorized, subject to the rhythms of industrial time and the implicit temporal repetitions of the daily newspaper issue.

The disciplined temporality of newspapers was used to establish a generalized model of family life. By the thirties, it was not only in “the content of the form,” to use

Hayden White’s expression, that the visual presentation of the comic strips were subject to this time-discipline; the content of the strips themselves were re-imagined in

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analogous ways. R.F Outcault, for example, moves from drawing the impoverished

Yellow Kid to the affluent Buster Brown, whose mischievous behavior was always met with punishment at the end of the comic strip. In Blondie, we see both Dagwood and

Blondie transform from swinging, stylish singles to a life of (still fashionable) work and family.

In addition to this form of time discipline within newspaper comics, a complex dynamic operates between the comic strips, the content of which is generally temporally arrested, and the newspapers in which they are situated. Newspapers are an expressly time-conscious medial environment. While each individual strip has its own inner history and temporality, it is perforce subject to the "homogenous empty time" of the newspaper within which it is circulated and consumed. Anderson’s appropriation of Benjamin’s term is used largely in a discussion of synchronicity and simultaneity. The implementation of a standardized form of timekeeping broken into discrete, measurable units makes intelligible the idea of different events occurring in different parts of the world simultaneously (e.g. political upheaval in the Philippines could share space with reports on English Parliament without any cognitive disconnect). Although the diegesis of these imaginary communities need not necessarily correspond to the real-world temporality of the news, they are, regardless, as implicated within this movement of “homogeneous, empty time.”

Both Benjamin and Anderson frame their concept of empty, homogeneous time against what Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” terms Messianic time.

According to Anderson Messianic time is “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (24). If the serial publication of Blondie operates within the

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homogenous, empty time of the newspaper, the internal narrative of the comic could be said to operate according to, if not a Messianic, then a post-Messianic time. Blondie currently exists in a moment in which a narratological apocalypse has taken place, roughly coinciding with the end of Chic Young’s career. Consequently, Blondie’s diegetic time is permanently suspended. In this post-eschatological moment, what is left behind is a seemingly endless and renewable hereafter offered to readers in the form of white picket fence suburbia and a formulaic, even ritualized, family system. This hereafter is a product of the multiple orders of time in the newspaper and daily strip reacting against each other.

From Caricature to Character

In its nascent years, Blondie bore a closer visual relation to many of the earlier pretty girl strips Young had previously produced. Hiho, Dagwood’s parents and Blondie herself were part of a vanishing style of cartooning which relied more on the use of social stereotypes and caricatures than on the creation of unique characters. Young demonstrated his commercial savvy by transforming Dagwood’s personality into a distinct set of predictable character traits and establishing a system of reproducible, gag-based formulae, thus adapting his comics strip to the expanding market forces in the comics section of newspapers. In their respective studies, Ian Gordon and David

Westbrook chart this movement from caricature type to comic character, rooting this evolution largely in economic and legal developments surrounding the trademark and copywriting of comic strips, characters, and comic strip titles. Many of the disputes over ownership were as a result of the conditions generated through operations of newspaper seriality.

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Both Westbrook and Gordon examine one of the most famous legal battles in newspaper comics history concerning R.F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley and its central protagonist, the Yellow Kid. Considered to be one of the originary newspaper comic strips, the Kid was the first-born child of the funnies. Outcault’s migration over to William

Randolph Hearst’s newspaper resulted in two Yellow Kid strips being published in two newspapers, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Journal. The strips were drawn by different artists and with different titles, a consequence of the legal haziness with regard to ownership in this emergent form. Writing on the problem surrounding the copywriting of strips, Westbrook cites Mark Winchester’s study of comic book litigation from the now defunct comics journal Inks: "a photograph could be registered for copyright, although the subject of a specific photograph could not"

(“Business of the Strips”). Therein lay the problem: it was widely asserted that, treated like a photograph, each comic strip was subject to copyright, but the comic strip as a whole was not. Only individual strips fell under the domain of legal copyright. The idea of ownership or intellectual property over the content within the strips—particularly the characters—had yet to be legally institutionalized. As the ontological properties of comics were not yet clearly defined (and still to this day critical definition of comics remain a contentious issue), the legal status of comics was measured in relation to codes established for other visual media, namely the photograph.

Buster Brown was a pivotal figure in establishing intellectual property laws on comics, demonstrating the value of comic characters for commercial merchandizing. As

Westbrook writes:

The copyrighting of strips themselves did not seem to make individual characters valuable enough to bring about this transformation. A

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copyrighted cartoon was conceived as a single work, and the ownability of its individual elements could not be derived from the ownability of the whole. Only reproduction in ancillary products could give comic strip characters a legal life that transcended any particular physical form. (“Business”)

The realization that products like chewing gum, toys, and shoes were also objects on which the comic characters likenesses could be reproduced to generate profit forced changes in the way comic strip characters were regarded under copyright law. This awareness required a paradigm shift in the legal code to establish the cartoon character as a sort of virtual commodity that is potentially endlessly renewable and transmedial.

Unlike material commodities, however, or the concept of uniqueness in art, the value of the comic book character increases through its proliferation and reproduction across media. As Westbrook argues, the comic strip character is “a peculiar sort of resource: one which cannot be used up, one which in fact becomes more valuable through profligate ‘spending.’"

As comic book characters gained a more distinctive legal status as their commercial potential was realized, cartoonists moved away from representing characters as types, toward representations of more uniquely imaged individuals. The early Blondie functions more in this mode. As Westbrook notes, the names of early comic characters were often reflective of their “generalized personality traits” (e.g., The

Yellow Kid wears a signature oversized yellow shirt). Chic Young initially engages in this semiotic convention with descriptive names like Blondie Boopadoop and Hiho.

Moreover, the early Blondie thrives on the use of urban caricatures that are just as strictly coded. Blondie is a flighty blonde flapper, competing for Dagwood’s allegiance against J. Bolling Bumstead, the cigar-smoking fat capitalist—a stereotype who belongs to the same country club as Daddy Warbucks and Rich Uncle Pennybags. As Young

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responded to the shifting economic and social climate, he moved away from these caricatures of class status to other, possibly subtler forms of coding. As a result,

Dagwood slowly begins to emerge both as the central focus of the strip as well as a more distinctly conceived character. While Blondie’s personality changes significantly as she moves from being a single working girl to suburban mother of two, her personality recedes as much as Dagwood’s moves into the foreground. No longer the source of punch lines, she exists as a foil for him and to some degree as a cipher—as a model, if inscrutable, wife.

More generally, the commercial and legal transformation of the material culture of the strips emerged out of the exigencies of serial production, and in turn spurred aesthetic developments in the representation of comic strip characters. In addition to the transition from caricatured types to characters, the settings of comic strips moved from realistic urban settings to either more fantastical or generalized urban and suburban spaces in newspapers’ bids for larger readerships. The placelessness that became a characteristic feature of newspaper strips was rooted in economic wars between newspapers and the rise of syndicates:

[I]ntellectual property conflicts and the deeply commodified nature of their art eventually led many artists to see their products as inhabiting an order of reality entirely separate from any urban setting, a reality whose boundaries were coextensive with the boundaries of the media corporation. (Westbrook)

As a consequence, time and space are stripped of specificity in Blondie, establishing a corporate space that recalls Marc Augé’s concept of “non-places.” Augé develops this concept to describe the unique spaces created by what he calls supermodernity. He defines supermodernity in terms of an “overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, and an individuated frame of reference” (49). In other words, we live in

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a world of information and traffic overflow where we are constantly asked to prove our identity (identity checks at tollbooths, customs, when making purchases, etc.). This excess and individuation are, somewhat paradoxically, the precondition for the isolation and anonymity that Augé feels to be supermodernity’s most profound impact on the social. Much like Jean-Paul Sartre’s earlier writing on seriality in Critique of Dialectical

Reason (1960), Augé is interested in the phenomenon of the lonely crowd—how conditions of solitude are ironically created through an increasingly networked, ever- shrinking global context. While much of Blondie is situated within the home space, it is a home that could be anywhere, a home as divested of cultural, regional specificity as the airports and supermarkets that typify the non-places of supermodernity.

This feature helps to explain Blondie’s enduring worldwide popularity. It has been translated into thirty-five languages and appears in over two thousand newspapers.

Blondie is as much a figure of globalization as the “international style” of Le Corbusier’s modular apartment complexes developed around the same time the comic was first published. His architectural spaces organized families into units that were as generic and fungible as the newly disciplined comic strip panels. What Le Corbusier did for physical space, Blondie does for its imagined world. Speaking of our relationship to physical places, Marc Augé writes, “Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, clichés” (95). Blondie is technically set in present-day United States, but every location in the comic exists as a non-place in which “[e]verything proceeds as if space had been trapped by time,” a time that Augé also sees operating with “the inexhaustible

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stock of an unending history in the present” (105). It is through such unending history

that Blondie provides for us the vision of an end of history.

The shift from the constructions of social stereotypes to more individual characters

and the displacement of the site of the comic storyworld into a generalized corporate

suburban space was contemporaneous with another revolution of newspaper material

culture that influenced the Sunday supplements: comics advertising. In 1932, seven

months before Blondie and Dagwood took their nuptials, Time published a revealing

article on the latest advancements in comics advertising:

Many a U.S. moppet has pestered his neighbors to buy a package of soap or bluing for 10¢. He rarely had to explain that he had answered “that ad in last Sunday's 'funnies.'”…Until a year ago there was no other advertising in comic sections, with the exception of occasional Christmas displays of Lionel Electric Trains and Gilbert "Meccano" sets. Then Hearst admen, mindful of a survey by Dr. George Gallup of Drake University showing that 78% of women readers follow the comics, got an idea. Reckoning further that 90% of all comics had "adult appeal," they undertook to sell space in the comics of the 17 Hearst Sunday papers to important national advertisers. The selling organization of Hearst Comic Weekly set a rate of $16,000 a page on the basis of 5,800,000. The Hearst venture was a decided success. (“Ads in the Funnies,” 49)

As the Time article14 indicates, as a result of this newfound awareness of the potential

for profit and a sense of comic strips as commodities, newspapers began placing

comics-style commercial advertisements alongside the comics themselves. Unlike

previous forms of single frame advertisements featuring comic strip characters

“endorsing” products, these ads were composed of sequential panels and story arcs

14 Non-coincidentally, perhaps anticipating the readership of a newspaper article about businesses advertising in newspapers, the advertisement adjacent to this Time’s article is for an international portable scale with the tagline “Profits…the results of accumulative accuracy” (49, ellipsis in original). Given that the article is about the traversing of different orders of content on the newspaper page—such traversal would be exemplified in the hodgepodge of narratives, graphic forms and styles of the comics page—this magazine page features two forms of industrial technology, the Gallup poll and industrial weight measures; both deploying a rhetoric of scientific precision with the explicit goal of advancing corporate profits.

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(Gordon 89–90). Men and women were depicted escaping adversities like the curse of

caffeine jitters or the blight of bad breath within the reassuring imaginary of a comic

universe. The Sunday supplements of most other newspapers very quickly copied the

successful advertising model developed by the Hearst papers “in response to the

restricted markets brought on by the Depression” after the Grape-Nuts “Suburban Joe”

series in 1931 revealed that the thirteen percent increase in sales resulted directly from

advertisements in the comics pages (ascertained through the use of encoded coupons)

(Gordon 81, 88). After the success of Grape-Nuts, many well-known cartoonists were

commissioned to write and draw these comic strips.15

At the same time that Hearst’s admen were blazing a trail in blurring boundaries

between art and commercialism in pursuit of new markets, Young chose to renovate his

comic strip so that it would more fall in line with these recent trends. Blondie’s migration

from pretty girl to family strip can be seen as an attempt to respond to new information

about female readership learned from the newly developed instrument of the Gallup poll

(heralded in the Time article), and consequent attempts to increase advertising revenue

by targeting a distinctive readership with increasing discretionary income. McLuhan

picks up on this transition when he writes “the moment this love-goddess is married, she

is of little interest to anybody but to the advertisers and to her children. And to them she

is conscience, the urgent voice of striving and aspiration” (68).

Despite Blondie and Dagwood’s financial anxieties, the comic in its new form

depicted an ordered middle class household with no apparent shortage of consumer

15 At the University of Florida, for example, we have an uncredited series of Grape-Nuts advertisement featuring the character “Fireball Twigg” that, based on the graphic style, may have been drawn by Chic Young.

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goods. The furniture, modern appliances and Blondie's own immaculate fashion sense were themselves implicit commercials for the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption being newly promoted in the adjacent comic strip style ads. As Gordon writes “the use of comic art in advertising strengthened the links between leisure, entertainment, and consumption” (82). Additionally, what Blondie further strengthens is the circuit between forms of popular culture and the labor structures within which they are embedded in the framework of print capitalism.

Given that both comic strips and comic strip-style advertisements were heavily invested in representing and celebrating the pleasures of consumption, it is no coincidence that labor is one of Blondie’s central preoccupations. By redirecting the attention of Blondie to work and family, the focus of the strip becomes almost exclusively concerned with (asexual) production and reproduction. The daily appearance of Blondie in the newspaper coordinates with the rhythm of the nine-to-five job Dagwood to which Dagwood races every morning as he crashes into the hapless mailman. The comic strip itself functions for the reader on the level of that crash; the mailman delivers a temporary distraction from work—but one that never prevents either the reader or Dagwood from eventually making it to the office.16 As Fredric Jameson observes there is “a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop” between culture and the economic, expressed here as the condition of a recurring narrative arc and the source of a predictable pratfall (Postmodernism, xv). The thematic content of the comic strip not only reflects the material conditions of its own repetitive, serial

16 Dagwood’s race to work which initially involved his racing for a trolley has now been substituted for a carpool; the highway having established itself as a defining element in America’s social geography.

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production cycle, but also reinforces the economic model to which its target audience is subject.

As the Time article references, information on newspaper readership was gleaned with the help of the latest statistical invention: the Gallup poll. In Spectre of

Comparisons, Anderson distinguishes between two types of seriality, which he defines as “bound” and “unbound.” Bound seriality refers to categories of classification, to ways in which individuals can be measured and situated within serially aggregable groups, for example, the census and electoral systems, which convert individuals into discrete, enumerable entities. By contrast, unbound seriality involves modes of establishing national community which exceed these governmental and institutional taxonomies.

Membership within these categories is amorphously conceived and infinitely open.

According to Anderson, “From the contrast between two styles of serialization—one, figured by the newspaper, unbound and unenumerated, the other, figured by the census, bound and numerated—the lineaments of two kinds of politicization and political practice emerge, both of which, however, show how basic to the modern imagining of collectivity seriality always is” (40).

One can locate “unbound” seriality in newspaper comic strips such as Blondie, whose diegesis eventually comes to exist outside of real, forward-marching time and which projects a model of universalized, transhistorical bourgeois citizenship, embedded in the routines of the workday and the consuming appetites—again, a- or de- sexualized—of the new middle class. The “bound” seriality of the Gallup polls and other measuring devices (e.g. the encoded coupons in the Grape-Nuts advertisement which set off a “tidal wave of comics-strip-style advertising” [Gordon 90]) directly informed the

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content of the funny pages. Thus the tools of bound seriality were appropriated for the purpose of constructing unbound serialities that projected a particular image of

American identity to a newspaper’s readership. Both bound and unbound forms of seriality engage in a mutually reinforcing circuit between the economic and the cultural in the production of early twentieth century newspapers. The changes in Blondie serve as an expression of the feedback loop between these two modes of seriality.

History Returns: The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary

The question of time and history—in and outside of the comic storyworld—is a thorny issue for the Blondie franchise, but during the large promotional campaign for

Blondie’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2005, the antagonism between the multiple registers of time at work in the strip moved, if somewhat inconsistently, into the foreground. A coffee-table book titled Blondie: The Bumstead Family History (2007) was published to commemorate the anniversary. The production of such a book was quite exceptional. Despite Blondie’s long-standing position within the newspapers, there had been little interest by those in charge of the Young estate in collecting the comic strips together into an anthology or treasury (a common practice with other long-lasting comic strips).17 Notably, the majority of strips from the Bumstead Family Album are from the past twenty years—an egregious under-representation, in fact, of Chic Young’s contributions to the strip’s early history and success. While it does present some comics from Blondie’s early days, Family Album ignores storylines which do not involve

17 The last official collection previous to 2005 was in 1958. Containing the same conceit as the Family Album, it is also organized thematically as a wedding anniversary (Blondie and Dagwood’s silver anniversary), yet deliberately avoids chronological depictions of the comic strip. See 25 years with Blondie: A Silver Anniversary Volume. Simon and Schuster: 1958. In fact, the collection was originally hubristically titled Blondie: The Complete Bumstead Family History (my emphasis), but the “complete” was later omitted (scans of the earlier title cover can still be seen in online bookstores). This telling revision emphasizes how the creation of a Bumstead family history necessarily requires it be incomplete. The act of forgetting is as significant as recollection for the creation of this totality.

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Dagwood, as well as the early years of the Bumstead household, when Alexander and

Cookie were either not yet born or were still very young children. Equally as significant in its flattening of history is the editors’ choice to organize material thematically as opposed to chronologically. The book presents a history of Blondie while essentially eschewing the very historicity that is the basis of a celebration of the comic’s commercial and imaginative success. By frontloading the history with contemporary strips, this family album gives a specious portrait of the material and imaginative world of Blondie, while pretending to give a thorough representation of the totality of the comic strip throughout the decades.

In keeping with the strip’s focus on domesticity, the anniversary was not framed as the anniversary of the strip, but as Blondie and Dagwood’s wedding anniversary. They used the diegetic conceit of a wedding anniversary despite the fact that, technically, it would only have been Blondie and Dagwood’s seventy-second anniversary since they were married on February 17, 1933, three years after the beginning of the comic.

If Blondie can come to signify a kind of post-apocalyptic end of history, the suggestion that the strip exists within historical time is problematic, emphasizing

Gordon’s claim about the double act of historical suppression in which comics participate—the first being their relationship to the culture in which they are produced and the second to their mode of production. While Blondie may embrace the cultural logic of late capitalism as an end of history through the machinic production of, echoing

Jameson, a “series of pure and unrelated presents in time,” the question remains: how exactly does one celebrate in time seventy-five years of pure and unrelated presents?

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The act of situating Blondie in the historical time of an anniversary while simultaneously not displacing the strip or its characters from an apparently universal present, involved a fairly complex and resourceful set of moves. The standard

“flashback” model obviously wouldn’t function for this celebration, so Dean Young used a synchronic as opposed to diachronic approach by commissioning the help of other widely syndicated comic strips to celebrate the strip’s anniversary (Figure 2-11). Blondie and Dagwood sent out invitations requesting that their “neighbors” in this imaginary community attend their huge anniversary bash. Other cartoonists paid tribute to Blondie in the space of their panel. Instead of depicting historical depth, the advanced age of the

Blondie was commemorated through the occupation of a wider surface on the newspaper page and reflexive integration within this system of syndicated comic strips.

In a flash of marketing brilliance, Young, in effect, spatialized Blondie’s history and bound that version of the history specifically to the strip’s medial context. The content of those strips which pay tribute affirms this approach by mostly concentrating on the signature gags in Blondie—precisely the points of its deepest repetition—rather than narrative or historical themes. For example, Mutts and Zits produced a version of the mailman gag, while the Wizard of Id bonds with Mr. Dithers over their mutual megalomania.

Only Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse attempts to temporally or narratively situate Blondie, which she cleverly does by embedding the comic within the real-time structure of her own strip. Johnston depicts John Patterson discussing how he grew up reading Blondie (Figure 2-12). The two orders of temporality are kept distinct and

Blondie remains embedded within the logic of comic book time safely framed by

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Johnston’s real-time storyline. Unlike the other comics, Johnston’s comic strips maintains the illusion that it still somehow exists apart from the other fictive universes— that the denizens of its comic universe are, like us, readers of the other comics—thus preserving Blondie’s ahistoricity by shifting it into a bracketed medial space. John’s comment “I feel like I know these characters” is ultimately more a self-reflexive meditation on Johnston’s own characters, who have grown old with their readers, than it is Blondie.18

Because the notion of an anniversary necessarily interrupts the smooth atemporality and ahistoricity which has become a defining trait of Blondie, the creators resort to metafictional techniques to suture the different orders of time at play—the historic time of the strip’s publication and Blondie’s almost allegorical time. In this scenario, all the syndicated strips are explicitly conceived as an imaginary community in which it is possible to momentarily break the fourth wall to acknowledge the existence of historic time, while also keeping this contained within the space of a comic strip universe. The image of comic strip totality evoked through these crossovers is a gesture that is not unfamiliar within other comics genres (since the early days of American superhero comic books, Batman and Superman, for example, have clashed with each

18 Johnston’s construction of temporality is ultimately as cyclical as it is a linear form of narrative storytelling. The comic featured the Patterson family who, in a striking contrast to most other newspaper strips, aged in real-time (the original four characters were based on Johnston, her husband and two children). Like Blondie, For Better or For Worse is similarly fixated on work and family, featuring the idealized dysfunctionality of a white, liberal, middle-class household. Unlike Blondie, however, death exists. Johnston’s comic emphasizes mortality, human-scale temporality and life cycles (e.g. the older son eventually takes over the house in which he grew up in to raise his own family assuring the continuation of wholesome family values). While aging is a recurring, death is only dealt with directly in rare instances. The most famous example is the dramatic passing of the Patterson’s dog Farley. In the latter strips when Johnston realized the series was reaching a terminal point due to her own health issues, she enacts a kind of displaced death of the central characters, John and Ellie, by inserting a story arc in which they purchase their own tombstones. The narrative arc of the series concludes with a final bittersweet strip that embraces the logic of “for better or for worse.” John and Ellie’s daughter, Elizabeth, stands by her dying grandfather’s bedside wearing the wedding gown in which she was moments earlier married.

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other). But this level of integration and conversation between comic strips was

exceptional in the newspaper pages19 and it is no coincidence that the given reason

would be the celebration of a marriage—the bedrock for the bourgeois living promoted

in most national newspapers.

The use of crossover in comic strips has served historically to strengthen the

notion that characters inhabit Westbrook’s concept of corporate space defined by the

boundaries of the comic supplement rather than by any real geography (“Business”).

The fictional topography that is imagined through the crossover obeys the laws of the

market first and foremost, rather than any constraint of literary realism. While

crossovers occurred in the early years of comics, they were never as widely

implemented as a narrative device as they were in comic books. Unlike superhero

comics, in which characters are placed within a larger diegetic framework, newspaper

syndicates have traditionally kept their cartoon worlds discrete—the panel borders

demarcating the various narrative orders on the page, but rarely permitting traversals

that might permit breakdowns of their closed temporalities. Yet, despite these traditional

demarcations, Brian Walker has emphasized that one cannot conceive of a history of

newspapers solely in terms of individual artists, even if certain cartoonists stand out for

their artistic innovations (118).20 The Blondie anniversary was a rare moment of

19 Another rare moment of newspaper crossover was “The Great Comics Switcheroonie.” It took place on April Fool’s day in 1997 with forty-six syndicated cartoonists participating in the strip exchange. The Bumsteads ended up in the panels of Garfield.

20 As important as individual artistic talents were, the editors exerted no small influence in determining the direction a strip might take. Two newspaper publishing giants, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Patterson—nicknamed “The Chief” and “The Captain” respectively—were instrumental (as their nicknames suggest) in influencing the production of the comic strips and their relationships to each other.

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reflexivity when the newspaper page integrates the various imaginary communities operating in this corporate space.

The Nuclear Family

The problem of history, which the anniversary anthology attempted to awkwardly resolve, is not exclusive to this comic strip. Ian Gordon incisively theorizes the way in which the multiple orders of time function in comic strips:

Two histories are suppressed in comic strips: first the strip's relation to the history of the society in which it was created, and second the internal history of the particular comic strip. (10)

Blondie enacts this double suppression. It has suppressed both its material and historical contexts while naturalizing a bourgeois fantasy of suburban, heteronormative family life by deliberately forgetting the internal narrative history of the strip itself, those conditions of class conflict and desire that produced its baseline characters and their behaviors in the first place. The perpetuation of Blondie in a contemporary moment, eight decades after its origin, necessitates the continual effacement and suppression of the strips and (mis)adventures that came before. In each successive era, the comic strip addresses the conditions of its particular historical moment, but this has been ignored in favor of a presentation that argues for the timelessness and universality of the comic strip—a kind of narrative nuclear winter surrounding those characters who developed at the onset of the nuclear age.

Rupturing the illusion of timeless continuity, there is an uncanny bond between one of America’s most popular nuclear families and atomic energy, an association that would likely be deemed inappropriate today. Like the hopeful monsters of superhero comics, Blondie and Dagwood reflect post-WWII nuclear ambitions and anxieties. This strange conjuncture can be seen in the educational booklet Dagwood Splits the Atom

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(1949). Dagwood Splits the Atom accompanied, somewhat surreally, the Gilbert U-238

Atomic Energy Lab (a science kit that came complete with radioactive uranium). The

pamphlet was a collaborative project between Chic Young and Joe Musial, with

prefatory material by General Leslie R. Groves, military director of the Manhattan

Project, and Bob Cosidine, a war correspondent during World War II. In this King

Features publication, Mandrake the Magician shrinks the Bumstead family down to the

size of atoms, allowing them to learn about nuclear science. While many King Features

characters appear in the book, albeit somewhat clumsily drawn,21 it is notable that the

Bumsteads are chosen as the main instruments for teaching—and propagandizing—the

marvels of nuclear fission (Figure 2-13, Figure 2-14).

In Dagwood Splits the Atom, the written text by Joe Musial serves as a polemic on

the necessity of developing “good” uses of nuclear energy so that it is not only used as

a destructive power. Yet the comics themselves are unsettlingly cavalier in their

representation of atomic explosions. After a lesson in the structure of atoms, Dagwood

uses a special “neutron bazooka” provided by Mandrake to successfully splits the atom

(Figure 2-15 and Figure 2-16). Despite the cautionary rhetoric surrounding nuclear

technology at the beginning of the text, the accompanying descriptive text indulges in

sensational military similes exclaiming: “neutrons are like artillery shells!” (22). Given

their status as exemplary figures of a reassuringly nuclear—in the other sense of the

word—family, we may conjecture that the Bumsteads were deployed in this comic in

order to promote a safe and family-friendly fantasy of nuclear fission and its postwar

uses. Chic Young’s relationship to atomic energy did not stop with this book, as he

21 Popeye, Olive Oyl, Jiggs, Barney Google, Snuffy Smith, Casper, Toots, the Katzenjammer Kids, and the Little King make cameo appearances.

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continued to include gags about atomic energy and radioactivity in his weekly strips

(Figure 2-15, 2-16, and 2-17). Dagwood fears he has become the victim of nuclear radiation and on multiple occasions believes that he has discovered the secret of atomic energy. The Bumsteads are an ideological containment unit working to suppress the conflicts and perils surrounding not only the destructive power of this emerging technology, but its possibility for revolutionary social transformation. Apocalypse, like utopia, has been as fruitful a concept for imagining alternatives to social realities, but the Bumsteads, because they are presented in a space outside of time, foreclose this possibility. Bob Cosidine titles his prefatory essay “The Beginning—or the End” commanding readers to embrace the wondrous benefits of nuclear energy (or face global annihilation). Attending this are Blondie and Dagwood, the alpha and omega, circumscribing the horizon of possibility available to citizens in a world that, much like the daily newspaper comic, function in a state of perpetual-yet-contained crisis.

Marrying the discourse of the nuclear family to nuclear technology succinctly expresses

Susan Sontag’s famous statement that “Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror” (224). Blondie lays this logic bare, delivered daily as the post-apocalyptic dream of a three-framed banal utopia.

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FIGURES

Figure 2-1. Blondie, April 2, 1933

Figure 2-2. Blondie, May 12, 1933

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Figure 2-3. Blondie, May 14, 1933

Figure 2-4. Blondie, December 6, 2004

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Figure 2-5. Blondie, January 29, 1933

Figure 2-6. Blondie, July 7, 1946

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Figure 2-7. Blondie, June 6, 1945

Figure 2-8. Blondie, February 27, 1944

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Figure 2-9. Blondie, November 14, 1937

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Figure 2-10. Dagwood at the Office (Adelman, 39)

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Figure 2-11. Blondie, Sept. 4, 2005

Figure 2-12. For Better or Worse, August 28, 2005

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Figure 2-13. Cover of Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949)

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Figure 2-14. Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 14.

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Figure 2-15. Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 22.

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Figure 2-16. Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 23.

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Figure 2-17. Blondie, February 23, 1947

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Figure 2-18. Dagwood Splits the Atom (1949), 23

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Figure 2-19. Blondie, July 7, 1946

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CHAPTER 3 KAWARA, KAWARA MACHINES, AND THE DEATH OF DEATH

On March 22, 1973, Karl Wallenda fell to his death in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The famous frontman of the “Flying Wallendas” lost his balance and plummeted to his death when a gust of wind blew him from his tightrope mid-performance. Not only did a large group of people witness his demise firsthand, but it was also captured on camera. The photograph was subsequently published in newspapers across the country. The haunting image shows Wallenda in mid-air, seconds away from fatal impact (Figure 3-

1). Because the chemical process of producing a photograph involves trapping light on photosensitive paper, many critics have argued that a photograph functions as a kind of undead trace of the past.22 But in this case photography captures a moment of undeath, showing Wallenda’s final flight. His fate is still uncertain; he is not yet dead.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the newspaper is a serial form in which time is rationalized, converted into discrete, homogenous units and it is within this temporal register that Wallenda’s dying moments are subsumed in the images of this moment circulated in newspapers. As halftone images between the pages of a newspaper, the photograph ceases to be marked with an autonomous temporality. Instead, it is transformed into one object in a series of similar and dissimilar objects, incorporated within visual registers of a standardized rhythm of time, passing as represented through daily production in print.

22 André Bazin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag are the most well-known critics who have framed photography in terms of (un)death. Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945) famously describes film as “change mummified” (15) while in Camera Lucida (1980) Barthes writes of “terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (9). Sontag speaks of the violence of the photograph as a “soft murder” (15) in On Photography (1973). Laura Mulvey’s Death at 24 Frames a Second (2007) further extends many of these ideas regarding the indexicality of the photographic image.

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Like most print newspapers (particularly those published prior to the era of widespread online publishing), the edition which exhibited Wallenda’s photograph was intended to be consumed and discarded, making space for the next day’s newspapers.

The fate of this image would likely have been to fade into obscurity had it not been given a second life. On March 23, 1973, Japanese Conceptual artist On Kawara bought a newspaper in New York. Kawara took his copy of the article on Wallenda’s death and read it carefully, underlying and marking up the text. He did not throw the paper away, but instead kept it as a record of his daily reading habits—part of an ongoing art piece called I Read.

Moreover, to mark the day’s events, Kawara produced a “Today” painting. Though the majority of paintings in the series are darkly tinted, somber monochromes featuring only the clean white text of the day’s date, on the day Wallenda died, Kawara produced a monochrome painting in a reddish orange hue. The only figure on this ruddy field was a crisp “March 22, 1973.” [Figure 3-2] These date paintings make those markings typically reserved for the back of the canvas central to the work. Once finished, each of the daily paintings are carefully placed in handmade boxes, with a newspaper accompanying the work. Since 1966, Kawara has produced over two thousand of these date paintings as part of his Today series. The Today series is intertwined with many other forms of serial practices that measure and record time. Some of his series have continued for years; others, such as the Today paintings, have continued for decades.

While Kawara has produced over two thousand date paintings with newspapers from over eighty countries (he always uses a newspaper from the country in which he is painting at the time), this particular combination of date painting and newspaper

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featuring Wallenda’s fall could function as a metonymy for the larger considerations of his work. This double vision of a man, “still alive,” but caught on the verge of death captures the serial temporality present in Kawara’s entire practice, ranging from the

Today series, to I Am Still Alive, and One Million Years. Jonathan Watkins asserts that, in Kawara’s work “[t]he date is about time, and surely and ultimately about human mortality” (82).Whether it is the instant caught by the photograph or One Million Years, in which human time is similarly represented as a mere blip on the scale of cosmic time,

Kawara’s work constantly returns to this fundamental point. “The serial objet is not designed to last,” observes Jean Baudrillard, describing the disposability of late capitalist consumer culture. Kawara’s work stresses that it is not only the serial object that is not designed to last, but also the serialized life.

Except for the few friends and colleagues who know him personally, Kawara’s life as an artist is traced exclusively through these objects (he refuses interviews and all biographical information except for what is revealed in his work). The paintings, postcards, telegrams, lists, and books are ways of marking his existence. By situating these objects within a series and in time (as opposed to regarding them solely as autonomous art objects), the act of recording can also be seen as an act of mourning for a death that has not yet arrived. This is a point Baudrillard stresses when he writes that the serial object is “the thing with which we construct our own mourning” (97).

Displaced mourning via a serial practice is very much at work in Kawara’s art. Just as the photograph of Wallenda features a man still alive, on the cusp of the horizon of death, Kawara’s repeated act of capturing a fleeting today is in the service of a serial death drive.

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Following from my analysis of comic strips in the previous chapter, I wish to look at

Kawara’s work as another example of a practice that is implicated within the serial logic of the daily newspaper. The discontinuous continuity that defines Kawara’s conceptual art is deeply enmeshed in forms of duration structured by mechanical reproduction. But, whereas Blondie’s enduring ephemerality resulted in characters that never age—the comic strip’s escapist flight from death creates a strangely post-apocalyptic temporal register—Kawara’s practice can be seen as a serial memento mori. Understanding that it is impossible to capture and hold the present, Kawara opts instead to mark time’s serial passing—the passing of all past todays.

This chapter will analyze how Kawara’s aesthetic labor is placed in conversation with multiple registers of time: a daily rhythm surrounded with timekeeping devices of twentieth-century communication media such as the newspaper and telegram, the historic time of human history as well as posthuman, geological scales of time.

Kawara’s work is firmly rooted in the “old” media of the twentieth century with human industriousness taking precedence over the industrial. Yet his approach to newspapers, telegrams, books, and postcards is uncannily prescient of certain trends in contemporary digital art and social media data tracking. After an examination of the way in which seriality functions in Kawara’s work, I will examine how he has been reappropriated by digital artists, whose “Kawara Machines” update the artist’s media to those serial forms made possible by networks. This chapter will ask what happens when the work ceases to be produced in what Lucy Lippard has termed “Slow Time” (360): when a machinic aesthetic is resurrected into the undead time of the machine.

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The Early Kawara

Emerging out of aesthetic movements of the 1960s, an era in which miminalism, systemic art, and pop art engaged core issues associated with serial practices,

Kawara’s art is the product of an extremely focused serial labor that explores the meaning of serial time and history when multiple forms of measurement are in dialog with each other. Kawara’s Today series began, fittingly, in 1966—the same year as

“Primary Structures,” one of the seminal exhibits of minimalist and serial (sometimes referred to as ABC)23 art. In an article for the Village Voice, Peter Schjeldahl went so far as to pronounce 1966 "The Year of the System" (qtd in Meyer 167). Two years later

Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard would publish Difference and Repetition and The

System of Objects respectively, both the products of the authors’ dissertations and directly confronting the contemporary problem of the serial object. Baudrillard addresses this object via cultural studies, examining human interactions within serial commodity culture, whereas Deleuze takes a more philosophical approach to thinking the problem of difference in seriality.

Before Kawara fully embraced this minimalist aesthetic, he worked primarily as a figural artist. Although there are clearly thematic resonances with his future work, the art of this period differs radically from conceptual work he would produce after the 1960s.

These paintings are rarely exhibited or reproduced in art books. Kawara typically arranged his pieces in series (The Warehouse, The Bathroom). While it is a challenge to discern the specific sequential narrative traced throughout these compositions, what

23 Barbara Rose is generally credited with first having used the term. See her 1965 article from the October-November issue of Art in America reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock. Berkeley: University of California Press. 274-297.

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is clear is the course of suffering and horror that runs through them. Produced less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is difficult not to read his paintings in the context of post-World War II Japan (Figure 3-3). We see in the Bathroom series (1953–

54) dismembered, pill-shaped bodies piled set against the sterile backgrounds of bathrooms or bathhouses (Figure 3-4). The diseased and spotted figures are set against piles of body parts stacked in increasingly large piles like microbes in a petri dish. The faces have vacant, but wide-open eyes, suggesting the figures are caught in a living death. The scarred, potted texture of the frequently swollen, pregnant bellies can be assigned two vectors: they evoke the spread of contagious disease (smallpox had yet to be fully eradicated) as well as the keloidal skin that distinguishes victims of atomic warfare. Although his paintings move towards increasing abstraction in this period, they maintain their visceral, biological quality (Figure 3-5). Nuclear and viral proliferation are visually conflated in this early work. (Tadashi Yokoyama identifies proliferation as a

“principle obsession” of Kawara's 1950s painting [62].) The concept of proliferation is present on both a thematic as well as formal level, as these pieces are dominated by a formal repetition that governs the aesthetic logic of the series. The iterative quality of

Kawara’s images that obsessively multiply a single pattern within a work and then repeat this pattern across different paintings identifies a tendency towards proliferating series and systems that would emerge more fully in the sixties, once Kawara broadened his art practice.

Kawara would move away from this form of painting, however, renouncing figural painting entirely and heading towards more conceptual modes once he left Japan for

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Mexico, expatriating in an age when few Japanese citizens lived abroad.24 While his

early work features intense visual repetitions of eccentric spaces (often the vertiginous,

non-Euclidean geometries were complemented by paper cut in non-standard shapes

furthering the viewer’s sense of spatial disorientation within radically de-centered

worlds), it appears that his own spatial dislocation and de-centering in a new

international context would dramatically transform his practice. From Mexico he would

go on to travel the globe and his nomadism (combined with the Vietnam war, which

served as the historical context for one of the early precursors to the Today series)25 would lead to the important addition of another serial element to his work: time. As

Kawara travelled from country to country, he took to meticulously recording his spatial and temporal coordinates. The proliferation of time, or as Jeff Wall writes in his essay on Kawara, the "disenchantment of time"26—its rationalization and instrumentalization—

now assumes a new importance in Kawara’s procedural practice.

Kawara’s art developed in a moment when the art world was attempting to move

away from the abstract expressionism of the 1950s. Instead of the canvas serving as

the unique expression of an artist’s hand (exemplified by the inimitable splashes and

strokes of New York School artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning), the

Minimalists created work in which the artist receded almost entirely from view. One

technique in this practice was to remove the hand of the artist. For example, Donald

24 Kawara’s father acted as his financial guarantor, working in Mexico at the time as the director of a Japanese engineering company in Mexico. He initially arrived to he country on a three-month visa but stayed for over four years. (Watkins 53).

25 On Kawara’s piece Title (1965) visually anticipates the date paintings. It is a monochromatic triptych with the year painted on the center canvas. On the left side the text reads “ONE THING” and on the right “VIET-NAM.”

26 The term is derived from Max Weber who described the way time has been demystified and rationalized by bureaucratic and industrial modes of social organization.

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Judd exhibited factory-made sculptures (Figure 3-6). Sol LeWitt’s primary concern with his wall drawings were not the materials, but the systems he created. He produced sets of instructions to be followed by those who wished to install his work. Whereas

Kawara’s work features a serial production that has taken place over decades, other serial artists of the sixties took a different approach to art that often emphasized spatial and systematic aspects of their work over the temporal.

Because such a diverse range of approaches have been taken, specific traits of serial art are difficult to pin down. Taking many forms in many media, critics have emphasized that one of the defining elements of the art is an emphasis on a systematic process. Writing in 1967, artist, curator, and critic Mel Bochner argued that “[s]eriality is premised on the idea that the succession of terms (divisions) within a single work is based on a numerical or otherwise predetermined derivation (progression, permutation, rotation, reversal) from one or more of the preceding terms in that piece” (100). From the internal series within a single work, this pattern can be applied to different objects in order to create a series. As Briony Fer suggests in her 2004 study of serial art: “[a] series consists of a number of connected elements with a common strand linking them together, often repetitively, often in succession” (3). These linkages are not entirely abstract, mathematical patterns, divorced from social context. Fer further stresses the relationship that critics have identified between seriality and contemporary industrial production and commodity culture (66). We see this, for example, in Judd’s aluminum cubes and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial architecture (Figure 3-7).

Like Kawara’s art, these works address these issues by engaging the problem of difference and repetition. The repetition is obvious; subtle differences can be detected

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when Judd’s series of cubes are displayed beside each other or when the Bechers arrange the industrial architecture into photographic grids (with the photos from the same perspective and under uniform lighting conditions). Yet, despite this play of difference, these repetitions leave the viewer with a sense of the standardized, modular conditions that mark industrial life. In Kawara’s work these kinds of repetitions, which take place in not only traditional art forms such as painting, but through everyday objects such as telegrams, maps, newspapers, and books, are part of lifelong practice of measurement and cataloging. He engages an art which is both objective and objectifying with respect to the way it renders a human life through multiple series of objects. Of all his different forms of data tracking, the date paintings have been the most consistently generated.

The Today series

The first date painting was made on January 4, 1966. Since then Kawara has produced over two thousand paintings which are dispersed across a variety of personal and public collections. He has continued to produce his Today series for over four decades. Saltz describes Kawara’s paintings as "[d]rop dead simple, repetitive, almost boring, they also put you in touch with ideas about chance, minimalism, the monochrome, seriality, conceptualism, and a vaguely Eastern attitude about self- negation” (52). In the space of a day Kawara will complete the painting and if he does not finish in time the canvas is destroyed. He uses the standard system of denotation for whatever country he is painting in (Figure 3-8), thus locating his system of timekeeping culturally and geographically. Although the font looks industrially printed or the product of some form of mechanical reproduction, the lettering is meticulously painted by hand. The colors on which the date is painted range in hue from bright

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orange and red to autumnal browns and greens. The canvases are most frequently painted in dark colors that approach black, but like Kawara’s contemporaries who worked with black monochromes such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and

Frank Stella, the paintings were never pure black. Each canvas contains its own unique hue. While Kawara’s paintings resemble an assembly-line mode of serial production, with an austere lettering and uniform background, the paintings themselves are the result of a careful process of ritualized craftsmanship (Figure 3-9). The monochrome not only challenges the exceptionalism of abstract expressionism—that each painting has a unique mode of creation—but it is also a potent commentary on the serial condition of post-industrial life. As Gilles Deleuze observes, “modern life is such that confronted with the most mechanical, the most stereotypical repetitions, we endlessly extract little differences, variations and modifications” (xix). As a result, mass-produced commodities are paradoxically celebrated as means of defining individuality. The kind of choice offered a consumer—whether those choices be of toasters, televisions, or toothbrushes—are imbued with the power to shape subjectivities.

It is within this culture of consumer choice and customization that the monochrome intervenes. The monochrome has at many instances been deployed as a kind of palette cleanser, a means of clearing away the inessential play of differences in order to distill a canvas to demonstrate to more fundamental relations between difference and repetition.

Kawara’s work does not pretend to follow Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum “make it new” nor does it celebrate the notion of the radical, individualized creativity of the artist.

Rather, it privileges Kawara’s compulsion to repeat, to engage in prolonged, continuous labor. In a way, compared to either art that purports to be the product of an expressive

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creativity or a capitalist culture which equates increased consumer choice with the expansion of unique, individuated identities, Kawara’s labor serves as a more ingenuous expression of the serial conditions Deleuze sees as the cornerstone of modern life.

History Painting

In addition to addressing the relationship between difference and repetition,

Kawara’s use of the monochrome and the newspaper also raises questions about the status of representation and history. Jeff Wall argues that Kawara’s painting can ultimately be read as a form of history painting, an old, venerable genre dedicated to the depiction of significant events. By juxtaposing the newspaper with the monochrome,

Kawara’s Today series is a form of serial history painting that signals the failure of illusionistic and representational imagery (the kind of paintings Kawara himself made in the fifties). The lack of figural imagery serves as a visual expression of Theodor

Adorno’s famous sentiment that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34).

Kawara functions within such an aesthetic of silence. Instead of a sequential, progressive series of history paintings, he shows us a traumatic present in the form of a syncopated series of singular todays. The monochromes mark change without falling back on a narrative of historical progress that has been discredited by events of the twentieth century.

Anne Rorimer also reads Kawara though the genre of history painting, comparing his work with other contemporary and historical artists who have either taken time

(Monet, Johns) or the newspaper (Picasso, Warhol) as a subject for their painting.

Emerging out of these traditions, Kawara “integrates physical form with thematic content in the realization of works that illustrate the human capacity to grasp time and space in

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abstract, visible terms” (137). Turning to many of the same painters as Rorimer in order to locate Kawara’s Today series within the tradition of history painting, Jeff Wall makes a different argument about how Kawara’s paintings operate. Wall’s opening premise is that canvas is not a neutral material, but that it is already a monochrome painting: “A new piece of canvas is not blank, though a new piece of paper or a new piece of foamcore might be. A new piece of canvas is already a monochrome; that is, it is already a certain kind of painting.” Prior to any application of paint, Wall argues that a canvas is already colored by a canvas’ relationship to art historical discourse.

For Wall the monochrome operates with a unique temporality—it is simultaneously a beginning and an end. Wall sees Alexander Rodchenko’s triptych Pure Red Colour,

Pure Yellow Colour, Pure Blue Colour (1921) as the revolution that was supposed to bring about the end of representational painting. Rodchenko’s “critique of bourgeois aestheticism” and “radical critique of bourgeois democracy” were intended to establish

“the conditions (or the “preconditions”) for new cultural models, new models of creation, production, and literacy. But this revolution, Wall argues, was a failed one and thus what was intended to be an apocalypse has become the foundation that supports modern painting. These issues are concentrated around the monochrome:

The special status of the monochrome implies that the incomplete social transformation of art is now the transcendental ground for the continuation of all actually existing genres of painting. The continuation of the genre is a mark of the arrested state of historical transformation and progress. From this viewpoint, all the genres now continue through the act of putting something on top of a monochrome—by effacing, supplementing, or disfiguring a monochrome. (126)

From this failed end turned point of departure, Wall argues that those traditional genres of painting that the avant-garde declared obsolete, have quietly resumed production, now underwritten by the monochrome. Because Kawara is painting the date on the front

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of his canvases, Wall argues that this is why he must be considered in relation to the long, venerable tradition of history painting. This is a negative relation, however: “The quotidinal nature of Kawara's work and its combination with the newspaper suggests that every day that passes is historically remarkable (by virtue of the fact that his canvases remain unmarked by figurative elements.”

While traditionally there is a gap between the event being painted and the painting itself, Kawara’s work closes this gap as the event being marked is no longer a significant event in the past, but the painting itself and specifically Kawara’s “refusal to paint”: “Each Today painting is a marker of a moment that the painter feels obliged to let pass without making any image of it” (141). This negation of the figural arts becomes a serial process that continues “in a state of repetition; each day, its lack of viable means is announced afresh, and this announcement once again reminds us of the time elapsed since this condition began” (142).

Having rejected all possibilities of representation, the newspaper accompanying the painting is where “[t]he day’s image is expelled.” Much as the comic strip remains both separate and apart from the newspaper, so too does the newspaper maintain this ambivalent relation to Kawara’s paintings. Rorimer echoes Wall when she writes that

“The box affirms the painting's definition as an object in its own right, while the subtitles and newspaper anchor the work of art to—while juxtaposing it with the existing, daily reality…The fact that the boxed newspaper may or may not be exhibited with its painting emphasizes the independence and interdependence of the two.” Unlike the collages of Picasso or Kurt Schwitters in which the physical newsprint is part of the canvas, Kawara extracts (and abstracts) the temporality of the newspaper. What is

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privileged is not its news content, but its pure seriality. As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests in his essay on Kawara: “Time itself can be found only outside of nature” (92). Time cannot be thought or experienced in and of itself and so Kawara points us towards an industrial form; his date paintings are, as discussed in chapter two, by the “empty homogenous time” that is the specific hallmark of the newspaper.

Having said this, while the date paintings do not express the particularities of day’s events, the newspapers that Kawara secrets away in the boxes nonetheless preserve a fragment of newspaper history. Examining some of Kawara’s earliest paintings, which he made as a student in the sixties, Rubén Gallo suggests that the independence between the newspaper and the painting may have been for more than aesthetic purposes. After studying art in the country, Kawara returned to Mexico and was present during the 1968 student massacres that took place prior to the Mexico City Olympics. In his tribute to Kawara, Gallo writes of these paintings that “one crucial fact escaped critics: buried in the boxes of these works are articles detailing the quickly escalating tension between Mexican student activists and their government…many of the newspapers and journals reporting the events were purged from Mexican archives and libraries, and are no longer available to historians anywhere but in On’s Today series”

(Watkins 24).

As with Blondie, where the temporality of the comic strip as a material-printed object is in constant dialogue with the content of the strip, Kawara’s Today series is measured in newspaper time. While Kawara’s visual reduction is deployed for very different effect, there is a kinship between Kawara’s use of the newspaper and the way in which Blondie and similar comic strips reduce narrative to a series of endless

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repetitions. Both Blondie and Kawara’s monochromes exist within an eternal present—a

present whose historical contingency is a fundamental aspect of the work, but one that

is suppressed to produce a homogenized series. Moreover, both Blondie’s pairing of the

nuclear family in the atomic era as well as Kawara’s quiet monochromes are serialized

expressions of post-war nuclear anxieties. As discussed in chapter two, Benedict

Anderson argued for the crucial link between seriality and subjectivity, the newspaper

specifically being one of the critical instruments for founding a collective identity. Briony

Fer has also argued in her book on serial art that “[s]eriality and subjectivity are

inextricably bound” (4) and although Kawara’s use of the newspaper is a departure from

its standard function Anderson imagines, Kawara uses the newspaper to produce a

serialized subjectivity.

Kawara’s interest in the temporality of the newspaper can be traced back further to

the 1950s, when he undertook a different kind of newspaper-influenced project,

producing an artwork that consisted of recording the daily headlines from the

newspapers.27 Like many of Kawara’s pieces, as will be discussed later, this work

anticipates a digital culture in which information can be chronologically accessed

through the headlines of RSS feeds or various forms of social media software. By

reorganizing the data and assembling the newspaper headlines together, one can

discern a continuous narrative of Japanese contemporary events beginning to form.

27 Between 1952–1956, Kawara’s burgeoning newspaper-based practice could be seen in his work Newspaper Headlines. Kawara captures the movement of history (as well as the temporally ephemeral form of the printed newspaper) by gathering together and sequentially displaying the daily headlines. Martin John Callanan’s I Wanted To See All the News From Today (2008–present) digitally updates this project by aggregating hundreds of newspaper headlines. In the spirit of Kawara’s 24-hour cycle in the Today series, Callanan’s work only lets you view the collection of newspapers from the day you access the website.

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Instead of taking in the daily newspaper as an ephemeral, throwaway object, Kawara preserves these headlines to produce an alternative historical chronicle.

This impulse is reframed in his Today series, where he maintains the temporality and rhythm of the newspaper, but submerges the particularity of these daily microhistories into two forms of abstraction, that of the monochromatic canvas and the system of date keeping. Kawara chooses to display the abstract forms of measurement while stowing the newspapers in boxes that exist as integral to the process, yet independent of the painting.

Serial Labor

A defining feature of Kawara’s practice is that it is always incomplete and in progress, each piece a fragment of a larger whole in continuous development. In the many writings on Kawara’s work there is ambiguity in how to refer to his work, specifically the date paintings. This difficulty in classifying applies when considering

Kawara’s wider practice. Although his work has been separated into various series, there is in some respects an arbitrariness to these designations. Henning Weidemann demonstrates this when he describes an imaginary day in Kawara’s life:

The ideal day for the artist might go something like this: He would start the day by printing "I GOT UP AT 1:23 P.M. ON KAWARA."… Following that he would send off a telegram with “I AM STILL ALIVE. ON KAWARA.” on it. On the way back from sending the telegram he would buy a daily newspaper and would read some of it. What he had read he would cut out for “I Read” … Then On Kawara would finish painting his date painting, and if he did manage to do so before 12 o’clock midnight, he would stamp the calendar of his journal and would write down the letter corresponding to the size of his date painting… (54-55)

Weidemann’s description evokes a life of monastic rigor and ritual attending Kawara’s series of autobiographical transcriptions recording time, his movement, and daily interactions. It is this serial labor that is the key ingredient to Kawara’s practice. While

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the various activities are eventually separated and reorganized into autonomous art pieces, they are also bound together as parts of an extended temporal process.

Kawara’s work, although not conventionally autobiographical, functions as a kind of multi-modal diary. A serial narrative of Kawara’s existence in space and time emerges through his practice with relations between the series effectively as significant as the iterative objects within them. Thus, the newspaper article on Wallenda’s death can be— can only be read, in fact, in this scheme—in relation to the date painting. These are turned into traces that mark Kawara’s presence at particular coordinates in time and space.

I Am Still Alive

Wall characterizes Kawara’s date paintings as a ‘refusal to paint’ and the specific way he expresses this refusal is by painting over a canvas that is already a canvas.

Wall suggests that this painterly gesture “mars the monochrome on which it is marked as much as would, for example, the face of a dead young woman.” Saltz reiterates this sentiment declaring “the works themselves have the presence of tombstones” (52). The relationship of this serial process to death can be seen in not only the date paintings, but much of Kawara’s oeuvre. As emphatically anti-dramatic as Kawara’s work initially appears, both Wall and Saltz resort to intensely charged imagery of death and dying as a mode of comparison. Both critics respond to the quality in Kawara’s practice that is inescapably mortal.

Kawara’s interest in measuring time and producing an artwork out of the temporal rhythms of everyday life extends beyond painting or any single project. Kawara has spent most of his life as an expatriate, travelling and living in countries across the world and this is perhaps a reason media such as newspapers, telegrams, maps, and

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postcards have served such critical roles in his work. With each of these media, Kawara

exploits the way in which these objects function using an absent subject.

In I Am Still Alive in which Kawara sends telegrams to friends containing nothing

but the message “I Am Still Alive” (Figure 3-10). It serves as an excellent example of

one of the ways in which Kawara is most present when he is absent. Writing on

receiving a telegram from Kawara in the seventies, Teresa O’Connor describes

anxiously opening her telegram wondering who died: “I was scared, sure that someone I

loved had died. Instead there was On's message: I am still alive. Was it good news? No

one had died. Nothing horrible had happened. But someone had reminded me, out of

the blue, that it could” (477). Pétur Arason also recalls his “slight panic attack”

wondering if the telegram was from the “tax authorities” or “news that someone had

died” (Watkins 15). By the seventies, telegrams as a mode of communication had

largely been replaced by the telephone and so for the average person, the telegram

was reserved for important announcements—typically deaths or the communication of

urgent, usually bad, news. 28 I Am Still Alive serves as an intrusive, morbid joke. It

threatens the recipient with the news of something terrible, particularly the death of a

loved one, only to read Kawara’s “Gotcha!” message. Once the initial impact wears off,

the recipient is still left without the epistemological certainty of the sender’s status as

there is a temporal gap between sending and receiving the message. The latency of the

telegram transforms the telegram into a contemporary memento mori as the recipient is

forced through an affective experience that leads them from anxiety to relief to a more

28 For a history of the telegram and how its functionality transformed as communications technologies advanced, see Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers. New York: Walker and Co., 2007. Print.

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general contemplation of human mortality. Kawara is still alive, but, much like the photograph of Wallenda’s final moments, this is a threshold position that gestures to the moment when that statement will not be true.

Kawara Machines

Kawara deliberately uses abstract and objective forms of time measurements as well as readymade serial objects such as newspapers and telegrams. If proliferation, as

Yokoyama argues, is one of the core aspects of Kawara’s work, from the 1950s to the development of his procedural form of artmaking, what happens when his methods are placed in an electronic medium? How does digital proliferation transform the kind of work his systems do? There’s more than just an underlying aesthetic connection between Kawara and digital art—the complex interplay between subject and object, the deprivileging of the uniqueness of the art object and the expressivity of the artist, and the development of systematic, procedural thinking—anticipates the kind of codeplay we now associate with digital art.

In 2006, Western Union sent its final telegram, making it difficult to continue producing I Am Still Alive.29 But Martin John Callanan’s project I am still alive (after On

Kawara) finds another way to deliver an unasked for memento mori (Figure 3-11).

A [hidden] transmission device, using Bluetooth protocols, continually searches for visible and open devices (mobile phones, laptops, PDAs etc) within an area. On discovering an open device, a simple message is sent, reading: “I am still alive”*.

In Kawara’s original telegrams, what has the potential to persist longer than sender or recipient is the piece of paper itself bearing the message. The telegram, by virtue of the fact that it is a printed medium, will continue to proclaim “I am still alive.” Something

29 A few companies around the world continue to offer telegram services.

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similar happens with the cell phone. The program disconnects the original typist of the statement “I am still alive” from the process of distribution and reception. Who is the “I” in this utterance? Is it the machine that produces the message and sends it to another machine? Is the utterance an autonomous assemblage of human-computer interaction, an object whose existence is autonomous as the phone can search and distribute independent of its original author-programmer. The machine sends out its message in which sender, machine and recipient are conflated into the statement “I am still alive.”

The abbreviated and terse style that Kawara enjoys with the telegram has been resurrected as a rhetorical mode in cell phone technology as well as social media—text messages and the 140 character posts of Twitter tie the logic of the telegram to emerging digital communications. Fittingly, on Twitter there is actually a user called

On_Kawara (identity unverified) who regularly updates with the post “I AM STILL ALIVE

#art” (Figure 3-12).

Callanan has yet another project aggregating the social media status updates on his website writing “Martin John Callanan is okay” (Figure 3-13). (The “okay” perhaps a reference to On Kawara’s initials). I would suggest that the banality of the expression

“okay” deliberately contrasts to Kawara’s “I Am Still Alive” as a commentary on the function of the social media in which he is operating. The specific content of most status updates are inessential, often insignificant, but they serve the same function of asserting the sender’s existence. Kawara’s telegram is addressed to a single individual and then eventually, perhaps exhibited in a gallery. Now these messages can be received by whoever wishes to hear. And in lieu of Western Union, an art practice is established out of a new kind of corporate social media. The project’s status as “art” is

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now assigned by the self-classified hashtag #art as opposed to the white walls of a gallery space or a lot number in an auction house. While Kawara’s telegrams are contingent upon the time lag between a message being sent and received, now the messages are transmitted in near-instantaneous real-time.

An art collective named MTAA has also appropriated Kawara’s work and reimagined it for networked and programmable media. In MTAA’s project onKawara

(v2), they ask what happens when you remove the labor of painting and instead, automatically generate a date image provided if someone accesses the site (Figure 3-

14, 3-15). Instead of a single artist, the task of producing a date painting becomes a collaborative and mechanically-mediated one. If a user accesses the website on particular day, a monochrome is instantly generated. Following Kawara’s practice, the dated monochrome is complemented by an RSS feed that links to articles from the day’s news. If a day passes when no user accesses the website, then no monochrome or newsfeed will be produced. A user can only access past monochromes and newsfeeds from those days when at least one user had accessed the website.

MTAA’s remakes ask us to think about the relationship of each digital date painting to the others. Must we analyze each individual date painting or is it more useful to examine their distribution across the various months, noting those days when a painting was made and those days when it was not? Do we conduct a close reading of the code used to produce the monochromes? Or perhaps we could we read the image against the news feed. For example, on the day I accessed the website, the newsfeed apocalyptically offered me “Survival Guide to Get through the End Times”— unintentionally reinforcing the eschatological overtones implicit in both onKawaraUpdate

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(v2) (Figure 3-16) and Kawara’s own work, which one might also read as a kind of survival guide readying us for our own inevitable end.

As much as Kawara’s monochromes are a refusal to paint in the sense suggested by Wall, in that they reject representational imagery, Kawara’s brushstrokes over the blank canvas that culminate with a carefully painted date are also an affirmation of a procedural painterly practice. For Kawara to paint a monochrome over another monochrome doubles the painterly gesture. This labor is an extended, serial process.

Lucy Lippard argues that “Kawara's medium is not paint and brush so much as it is Slow

Time.” (360). MTAA’s project, by contrast, operates in a world of digital micro- temporality, of serial, instantaneous monochromes. With analog paintings, a pure monochrome is impossible. John Cage famously described Rauschenberg’s white paintings as “airports for particles of dust and shadows that are in the environment”

(109). The materiality of such a surface means that you can think, but never see the pure painted monochrome. With the digital monochrome, it’s not about the screen, or output. The digital monochrome is a number—it’s the idea of color. Specifically, in the case of these black monochromes, a field is generated via the simple html code

“000000.” So the digital monochrome moves the monochromatic to the realm of code rather than surface.

While the number may be perfect, the screen’s emission of black, as with analog paint, is not pure. A true black, which absorbs all color, is notoriously difficult for computer screens to achieve because of the light emitted behind the pixels. For the blackest black one would have to see Fredrik De Wilde’s Hostage (Figure 13-17).

Working with nanotechnology labs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Rice

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University, De Wilde sutured together nanotubes to create a 99.9% light absorbent

painting, the world’s blackest monochrome. In the spirit of Yves Klein’s experiments that

resulted in International Klein Blue (IKB), De Wilde’s produces a black monochrome

able to trap and hold hostage all color.

Hostage was first exhibited at Ars Electronica 2010 and the organizers write of the

piece that the “optical characteristics let this material set the benchmark standard,

something akin to what the atomic clock did to precision timekeeping” (De Wilde).

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the most advanced form of timekeeping is

juxtaposed with the production of these monochromes in a way that recalls Kawara’s

relationship between monochrome and date keeping. Jeff Wall concludes his essay

describing the Today monochromes as the “disenchantment of time” (142). The

systematic production of the date paintings give the appearance of having been

mechanically reproduced even though it is human labor which drives their production.

MTAA’s project (or in the case of De Wilde, monochromes assisted with advanced

nanotechnology) are wedded to a markedly different form of temporality. Where

machine labor now works in conjunction with human labor, a machine-assisted form of

temporal precision accompanies the production of these monochromes. Added to the

disenchantment of time, we now have the disenchantment of color.

It is not only On Kawara, but also many minimalist and post-minimalist artists

whose legacy in digital media is only beginning to be understood.30 I would argue that

the artworks are forms of Kawara machines, incorporating his serial rhythms,

30 See Joëlle Gauthier’s “Art minimal et Hypermédia” for one online discussion of the interrelationship between digital media and minimalism.

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submerging the subject, and translating history and representation into these abstract and programmatic modes of expression.31 What is a lifetime of labored avant-garde practice focused around measurement of time and space, of locating himself within various registers temporally and spatially, is now ubiquitous technology. Now it is common practice to see artists and graphic designers such as Nicholas Felton who meticulously record their daily data in order to make creative visualizations out of these transcriptions.

The Kawara machines not only disperse Kawara’s serial labor, but they confirm that although Kawara may be absent from much of his work, his name has become a brand. While the digital Kawara machines are freely distributed online, Kawara’s labor, by contrast, is highly priced within the art world. In the art criticism of Kawara’s work, the relationship between the serial, industrial nature of both his labor and objects is never discussed in relation to their market value. But given the nature of Kawara’s practice, it is worthwhile to consider how the market places a value literally on Kawara’s time.

Although there are thousands of similar objects in circulation, Kawara’s market value is only strengthened through his serial mode of production. A search of the past lots of

Christie’s online database shows that the recent sales of Kawara’s date paintings rarely sell for under $100,000 USD (and they are frequently sold at much higher sums). A set of telegrams sent between 1973–4 was sold in 1998 for $13 800 USD. Sotheby’s lists a relatively recent “I am still alive” telegram from 2000 as having sold for $23 750 USD.

Despite (or perhaps on account of) the fact that Kawara is a notoriously invisible

31 A work that is not under discussion, but demonstrates Kawara’s programmatic thinking was his work Codes (1965) and then Paintings of Codes (1965) that use indecipherable abstract patterns and geometrical figures.

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presence, these objects have gained cultural capital solely through their proliferation and dissemination via the critical discourse surrounding Kawara’s art. Although

Kawara’s work, like many other conceptual artists and minimalists, is a response to commodity culture, it is simultaneously implicated within it. The sale of Kawara’s work demonstrates that an extremely high value is placed on his serial labor in relation to the commodities being exchanged (as opposed to the materials used to create the work). In the art world, Kawara is not so much an embodied individual as a blue-chip brand.

While #art by On_Kawara may be offered at a much lower price of admission on Twitter,

Kawara’s art functions according to the laws of capital.

One Million Years

The final work of Kawara’s that I will discuss is a project titled One Million Years

(Past & Future) (Figure 3-18). Thus far, we have seen Kawara operate within human- scale orders of temporality—the time of the newspaper and the telegram. In One Million

Years, Kawara’s extends his reach much further to measure the time of the human against vaster frameworks. In 1970–71, Kawara published twelve sets of book volumes in a series titled One Million Years (Past). Each page is composed of five 10×10 matrices of dates, listed chronologically and beginning in 998 031 BC and ending in

1969 AD (Figure 3-19). Following this, between 1980–1998, he published multiple sets of One Million Years (Future), publishing the list of dates in a similar format, but going from 1981 AD to 1,001,980 AD in the future. This future is a purely speculative, one in which the status of the human is unknown. We are invited to see beyond the end of humanity. A disarming effect of the books is seeing how human time, not to mention our individual life spans, comprises only a slim sliver of pages either at either the conclusion or start of the two volumes. In Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode wrote that in order

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to “make sense of their span [humans] need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. He concludes that humans fear the end since “the End is a figure for their own deaths” (7). And so, if we think of these books as a kind of novel, narrated not on the order of human, but geological time, we see our ends represented as less than a page of dates amongst the thousands of other sheets.

This time-scale dramatically reframes the way in which we perceive our own lives.

Rather than serving as a dramatic culmination, One Million Years reveals the non- exceptional status of humans, placing our era in the middle of an infinitely receding and advancing time scale.

Kawara’s choice to publish One Million Years as a book is not arbitrary. The book is a medium well-suited to staging the confrontation between human and cosmic time.

While the form of a book generally contains human-scale time and narratives within its pages, One Million Years tells a different story. In order to capture the unimaginable scale of millions of years, Kawara resorts to lists—the length of time being represented is complemented by a book with an equally untenable reading time. Having to undertake a complete reading of One Million Years would exceed even the most diligent reader’s tolerance. (This is naturally why one of Kawara’s most recent projects has been to read One Million Years. He gathered a group of readers who, over a period of months, collectively produced a CD box set in which each day listed in the books is read out loud.)32

32 Jerry Saltz was one of the reader’s selected for the CD project who closely tracked his experiences during the recording. He begins reciting with some awkwardness and discomfort. But towards the end he reports a transformation “1:55 to 2:05 PM Something amazing happens. I decide to look up from the page and begin reciting years with my eyes closed. Start drifting. No idea how many years are passing. Hear only sound. Then sound seems to fall away. I become some sort of Indian raga, the singer and the song. Perceive cadences. rhythms, tonalities. Euphoric” (53). This meditative ecstasy produced through serial repetition is perhaps a clue into the logic behind Kawara’s own practice, on which he himself refuses to

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Glacial Time

In the Today paintings, history is subsumed within a monochromatic aesthetic of serial silence. I Am Still Alive operates on the threshold between life and death and One

Million Years situates the human within geological time. Tracing Kawara’s work back to the lesser-known paintings and drawings from the fifties, human transience is a consistent trope recurring throughout his practice. If we understand death as a powerful force in Kawara's work, to which he serially returns, death can be read not only in terms of the traumatic and catastrophic history of individuals or of human civilization, but it can be seen as productive and generative. His practice is an affirmation of what the philosopher Quentin Meillasoux has called the "glacial world":

[I]t is this glacial world that is revealed to the moderns, a world in which there is no longer any up or down, centre or periphery, nor anything else that might make of it a world designed for humans. For the first time, the world manifests itself as capable of subsisting without any of those aspects that constitute its concreteness for us. (115)

By placing both himself as well as his audience in serial time, Kawara removes any lingering sense of human exceptionalism. Narratives have been created to represent the glacial world. This is the world, for example, at the end of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, after the unnamed narrator voyages millions of years into the future to see life beyond life, a world that has been emptied of humanity in the face of a cooling earth. Witnessing the earth’s entropy, the Time Traveller is chilled with the terror of this emptiness. Unable to face this horror of the cold world, returns to his own time—the time of the human.

While the Dying Earth scenario is the subject of numerous science fiction narratives,

Kawara rejects narrative and its capacity to render these time scales comprehensible

offer any comment. By measuring time, the artist loses himself within its flows. The entire set of CDs are currently priced around $2000 USD (Akira Ikeda Gallery).

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and assimilable to human modes of intelligibility in favor of an aesthetic register which captures the cold indifference and unrelenting passage of time. We do not need science fiction in order to imagine a glacial world in a distant future; Kawara’s work shows us how we already exist in such a moment.

Kawara produces work that expresses Meillasoux’s glacial or speculative aesthetic and the paradox of attempting to create art that imagines a world voided of human subjectivity. Since Kawara cannot entirely evacuate his work of subjectivity, he stages a confrontation and invites us to imagine humanity as a vanishing point—not one to be feared as an object of horror (as depicted by the Time Traveller), but simply acknowledged and measured against the other time scales he employs. Human-scale time may only makes up the last couple pages of his massive novel One Million Years

(Past), but it is notable that he uses the form of a multi-volume book; he de- anthropomorphizes a form that conventionally operates within the anthropocentric order of human-scale time and narratives.

Death of Death

In 1921, Rodchenko painted Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow

Color as a way of announcing the death of painting. Despite claims that the monochrome was the final stroke, this death blow has been repeatedly delivered. Ad

Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella continued to kill, resurrect, and then kill painting again; what was once declared an endgame strategy was converted into serial practice. From Rodchenko’s declaration of the “death of painting” to Jeff Wall’s essay on On Kawara’s Today series in which he proposes it is time to think of the “death of the death of painting”, I would like to offer that the death of painting, as well as the death of the death of painting in Kawara’s work, can be thought

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of in more basic term: death (128). In Kawara, fittingly, we see both death and the death of death: human death, individual and collective, becomes a vanishing point within the serialized time of his art. Nevertheless, in this moment of death’s erasure, of death’s death, we see death return as an even more powerful inscription. To think outside of the constructs of life and death, to think in terms of machinic, as seen in the temporality of the newspaper and the telegram, and geological time, as seen in One Million Years— these are deeply humbling and de-anthropomorphizing gestures. Yet there is always a troubled and intractable remainder that circumscribes Kawara’s pieces, temporally and historically, within the realm of the human. For many critics, aside from myself, it’s striking how Kawara’s work, which is void of the usual tools for producing affect, seems to say more about Kawara and who he is than other forms of intimate expressionism. To accomplish this, Kawara retreats. He retreats into instrumentalized and geological registers of temporality. By stripping history of its history, and his “biographical” pieces of expressive biography, Kawara’s procedural logic—which has been appropriated both by digital media artists as well as digital media more generally—ultimately becomes an even more expressive battlefield for this conflict between life and death: between this indexical moment that marks a life situated within a system of cold, mathematical abstraction.

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FIGURES

Figure 3-1. Karl Wallenda falls to his death

Figure 3-2. From On Kawara's Today series, March 22, 1978

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Figure 3-3. Dump (1954)

Figure 3-4. Drawing #9 from the Bathroom series (1953-4)

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Figure 3-5. Drawing #22 from Events in a Warehouse (1954)

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Figure 3-6. The South Artillery Shed housing Donald Judd's sculptures in Marfa, TX.

Figure 3-7. Bernd and Hilla Becher's Cooling Towers (1963-73)

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Figure 3-8. A date painting created in Mexico

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Figure 3-9. Kawara's process (Watkins 76-77)

Figure 3-10. A telegram from On Kawara addressed to Sol LeWitt

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Figure 3-11. Martin John Callanan's I Am Still Alive (After On Kawara)

Figure 3-12. Screenshot of Martin John Callanan is Okay

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Figure 3-13. Screenshot of a Kawara-inspired status update on Twitter

Figure 3-14. A screenshot of a digital date painting from MTAA's onKawara(v2)

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Figure 3-15. A calendar displaying which days images are available for onKawara(v2)

Figure 3-16. Screenshot of the newsfeed in onKawara (v2) for October 26, 2010

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Figure 3-17. Fredrik DeWilde's Hostage (2010), the world’s blackest monochrome painting

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Figure 3-18. One Million Years (Past and Future)

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Figure 3-19. An excerpt from a page of One Million Years (Past)

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CHAPTER 4 THE SERIAL DATABASE OF HOMESTAR RUNNER

Recent anthological and archeological publications such as N. Katherine Hayles's

Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), accompanied by volume one of the Electronic Literature Collection as well as C.T. Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital

Poetry (2007), suggests not only an emerging disciplinary drive to establish both a language and history for critical-theoretical discussion of digital literature, but also such a work itself a product of a field which has itself already stabilized and is in search of both a history and a canon. This chapter explores the place that serial works occupy within these disciplinary systems of classification of new media. My focus will be on the intersection of serial narratives with database aesthetics. An ongoing project like Mike and Matt Chapman's Homestar Runner (Figure 4-1) may fall outside the range of what many digital media scholars might strictly regard as electronic literature, but the

Chapmans’ project serves as a valuable case study for addressing how new media engages serial practice with a renewed investment in its potentials.

In inverse proportion to its popularity as a narrative device, seriality has historically received little scholarly attention within literary studies.33 This may be due to its long- time association with popular forms of mass-produced media such as comics, soap operas, and genre fiction. Homestar Runner’s structure as a series of serial micronarratives embedded in a larger database, connects it to critics’ identification of technologically-conditioned melancholia in contemporary electronic literature. This melancholia can be seen as a response to the dehistoricizing impulse of media

33 Jennifer Hayward’s Consuming Pleasures (1997) traces the historical origins of biases against seriality, rooting these in 19th century anxieties towards industrialism and an emerging working class readership.

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development, what Terry Harpold terms the “conceits of the upgrade path” (3). As

Harpold writes, “[b]ecause technical innovation in popular computing is driven more by the allure of expanding markets than by something so quaint as a sense of responsibility to historical continuity, commercial discourses of the upgrade path will inevitably promise consumers new and more satisfying interactions, and encourage them to see the older ones as outmoded or no longer relevant. The conceits of the upgrade path are tightly bound to ideologemes of the marketplace and the fantasies of progress they induce” (3). In Homestar Runner, the temporal movement of fragmented serial narratives within an overall database-driven structure generates a global, aggregate work in which site where the melancholic response to loss manifests itself as both a resistance to the dehistoricizing, commercial impulse of a cultural and technical upgrade path, as well as a submission to the power of the new.

Serialities

Before turning to a discussion of seriality in electronic forms, it is worth noting competing, yet interrelated, uses of the term seriality which apply in this context. The term is generally used to mean objects that are arranged in some form of a series—this could be temporal, spatial or conceptual. In literature, the term frequently refers to stories or publications that are released in materially discrete units, in intervals over a period of time demarcated from one another with a forced pause, which is incorporated into the reception of the work, according to requirements of publishing and distribution.

Alternately, the form of seriality associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet and other authors of the nouveau roman generally refers to more synchronic temporalities. Dina

Sherzer identifies serial patterns in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and other French novelists “by means of a number of elements which are repeated syntagmatically with

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some variation” (88). Although the texts are characterized by “non-linearity, discontinuity and fragmentation,” (87) their organizing principle is based on repetition and difference such that “something always echoes something else” (92). Many of these non-narrative, associational linking strategies of the noveau roman anticipate devices of contemporary digital hyperfiction. And as discussed in the previous chapter on On Kawara, this form of literary serialism in the nouveau roman also has an analogue within contemporary art.

The rigorous systems of minimalists such as Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd embrace serial techniques through their spatial deployments of highly repetitious, schematic designs.

As discussed earlier in earlier chapters, Jean-Paul Sartre and Benedict Anderson have both applied the concept to model an individual’s relationship to serially aggregable group formations: Anderson’s seriality relates to issues of nationalism and identity; in Sartre, seriality is a condition of modernity describing individual disempowerment. Each ties his discussion of the term to situations of media and specifically those of print culture.

What binds these multiple modes of seriality, emerging out of fine art, popular culture, political science and statistics, appears to be a relationship of media and consumers of media to social and material conditions of industrial society, insofar as modes of mass production, consumption and organization have come to rely more heavily and explicitly on serial logics. Digital media and specifically, a database aesthetic, subsume these multiple, perhaps even contradictory uses of seriality under the regime of production. The experimental, associative logic that characterized the

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serial work of the new novelists is, in the case of a website like Homestar Runner,

combined with methods of sequential storytelling, supported by database operations.

Serial Biases

Walter Ong’s influential genealogical reading of technologies of speech and writing

in his classic text Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982) has

influenced the way I conceptualize seriality across different media. Ong examines how

cognitive processes have varied and evolved with cultural shifts from primary orality to

literacy and more recently, to electronic literacy.34 The incommensurability between

these different paradigms, as Thomas Kuhn might characterize the transitions, helps to

explain the way in which literate cultures have undervalued oral poetic production.

While my project takes print culture as its starting point, what is particularly

illuminating about Ong’s research is the way in which his findings on oral poetics can be

directly related to many of the conventions of textual seriality. What Ong labels “residual

orality” in print culture is readily locatable in expressly serial forms of literature, perhaps

owing to the fact that oral poetics are fundamentally reliant on an allied concept of

seriality.

Ong distinguishes the basic episodic structure of oral narratives from the more

tightly conceived structures of print, declaring “the voice’s allegiance to episode always

remained firm” (148). He argues that print “locked words into space and thereby

established a firmer sense of closure than writing could. The print world gave birth to the

novel, which eventually made the definitive break with episodic structure” (148-9).

34 Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy expands on Ong’s paradigm in order to identify the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of an electrate subject. See Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (1994).

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Ong describes how many of the distinctive techniques of oral narratives, such as formulaic, prefabricated repetition and type characters, were used as mnemonic devices by bards who did not, as is widely believed, recite a consistent, unchanging textual corpus, so much as construct new, slightly different stories from a repertoire of learned expressions. “Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker” (22), writes Ong, metaphorically Taylorizing the creations of primary oral culture.

Seriality’s tainted relationship to industrial reproduction can be, thus, anachronistically applied to systems of oral production in a pre-industrial cultural condition. (To turn this application of the idea to a more contemporary moment, this emphasis on oral poetry as the product of reassembling pre-fabricated, non-original materials offers a model of creativity that in digital mashup culture has become widely accepted.) But the concept of an “assembly-line” worker is deeply antagonistic to concepts of print-based literary production, in which originality is viewed as creativity erupting from within. In contrast, although a bard may never sing precisely the same song twice, he or she is continually repackaging the same “materials, themes and formulas” which “belong to identifiable traditions.” Within these traditions “there will be as many minor variants of a myth as there are repetitions of it, and the number of repetitions can be increased indefinitely.” (42) Ong observes how future literate generations would come to dismiss this model of creativity because “[o]riginality consists not in the introduction of new materials but in fitting the traditional materials effectively into each individual, unique situation and/or audience” (60). Once individuals had thoroughly interiorized the conventions of chirographic culture, oral narratives would come to be regarded as redundant, clichéd and hopelessly naïve—which is to say,

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unexpressive of a new (literary, chirographic) subjectivity, associated with authentic

creation. What Ong implicitly identifies as the structural elements of oral traditions that

were devalued with the rise of print were its serial conditions. Many of the same

criticisms he describes as directed against oral poetry and performance return to the

fore in serial print works. It appears as if the residual legacy of orality has specifically

found a niche within serial literature.

For example, in early serial comic strips and books, there may have been plot

differences episode to episode, but the emotional arc was stereotyped and strongly

conventional. Similarly, the strongest feature of oral narrative that Ong identifies as a

residual element of chirographic culture is not the serial nature of production, but the

use of typed characters (“characters,” in the sense of conventional agents of the

storyworld). The completely externalized heroes of epic, episodic literature eventually

give way to the development of inwardly-turned characters noteworthy for their

personal, psychic crises; this is a standard narrative of the development of Western

literature by way of the rise of the novel. Yet this transition did not obliterate prior

models of fictional agency. As Ong writes, “[t]he story of type characters and the

complex ways they relate written fiction to oral tradition has not yet been told” (154). A

small intervention on this issue would be to make a genealogical link with serial comics

and fiction, which historically were often perceived as ephemeral, repetition-based

forms of throwaway entertainment.35

35 Ong himself notes the relationship between oral character types to advertising and genre literature (genre literature being frequently invested in serial production). Yet, despite his sensitivity to cognitive paradigms of oral literature, he reproduces some of the typographic biases he is critiquing when discussing how this particular aspect of orality has persisted in contemporary print culture. He dismisses these typed and exteriorized figures when speaking of “regressive genres such as Westerns” (153).

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When discussing the relationship between text and image, Ong argues that “[p]rint eventually reduced the appeal of iconography in the management of knowledge, despite the fact that the early ages of print put iconographic illustrations into circulation as they never had been before” (130). Yet, in graphic narratives combining image and text, the flat, typed character has flourished. Oral narratives used stock characters as memory aides; the character types of the funny pages serve a similar function, in that the short, daily strips rely on codified narratives and characters to (re)orient the reader and facilitate quick reading on an interrupted and irregular basis.

A fundamental characteristic of pre-literate and pre-electronic oral narratives is their ephemerality: “sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent” (Ong 32). As seen in the second chapter on

Blondie, the embedding of serial works in newspapers retained a version of this transience. Initially, comics were conceived as something to be consumed in the here- and-now of a single reading and then discarded. Though they left a physical trace in space (unlike sound), their materiality was still conceived as impermanent and extemporaneous, in contrast to other forms of textuality that conformed more readily to the demands of high literacy and its expectation that what was written should persist.

As I’ve discussed in chapter one, the transition from generally recognizable stock character types to more uniquely conceived characters was in part brought about by a of the growing influence of copyright laws, a legacy of print culture (cf. Westbrook or

Winchester). Yet what did not change was that, while comic characters may have become more individualized, they remained largely flat and conformed to a fairly strictly defined set of characteristics and behavior.

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Perhaps because serial texts share many characteristics with oral narratives, they have been subject to the same accusations of cliché, redundancy and naiveté. These excoriations of serial texts, as Jennifer Hayward’s important study Consuming

Pleasures explores, have been largely rooted in a misunderstanding of how serialized texts function. She demonstrates through audience analysis how fans interact with texts in complex, socially dynamic ways. Much as Ong differentiates orality from literacy—in that speaking a story is not simply just a seamless transmission of information from one individual to another, but an event in which a multitude of social forces govern the speech act—so Hayward points to the way in which the consumption of serial texts is embedded in the complicated structures of its audience’s (shared) lives. Ong tends to see the “event” as a characteristic of orality, and “signs” as a feature of literacy. Studies such as Hayward’s demonstrate that the concept of the “event” is just as significant in literary contexts.

Walter Ong’s research on the influence of writing technologies relates in several respects to Benedict Anderson’s description of the influence of print capitalism. Ong emphasizes the importance played by the development of chirographic and print discourse. Whereas Anderson argues that print was harnessed in order to create fictionalized "imagined communities" in which individuals imagine themselves in a communion with strangers across time and space, Ong's focus is on the way in which print culture produced a greater sense of individuation via the enhancement of a "sense of personal privacy" (130), "private ownership of words" (131), and a "sense of closure"

(132) through the construction of progressively tighter plot structures of fiction. Ong and

Anderson, taken together, show the ways in which writing technology served to solidify

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both the authorial Cartesian subject as well as how this subject is defined against an expanded network of imagined others. As we will see in the following chapter through a discussion of seriality and the network, the culmination of this dual progression of antinomies is that the more we organize ourselves within tightly concentrated networks, the more isolated and individuated we become.

The Literary in Electronic Literature

The privileged position of print has influenced both the backwards glance at older forms of expression as well as recent movements that attempt to carve out a space for the literary within digital production. If the definition of literature—in contrast to, for example, “popular” or ephemeral works of fiction—has already faced numerous challenges within regimes of print, attaching the modifier “digital” or “electronic” to the term “literature” only further complicates this definition. One could relate this issue to the same problems that Walter Ong identified when he admonished scholars for use of the term “oral literature,” describing it as a “preposterous term” that revealed “our inability to represent to our minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing” (11). The expression “electronic literature” must contend against the same print-centric biases that once infelicitously framed oral culture as a lesser subset of writing technologies.

Disciplinary and institutional structures that define conventions of critical inquiry in the humanities has led to the wide adoption of terms such as digital poetry and electronic literature. Such terminology engages the tension between print and digital forms of writing. In addition to the fact that electronic literature, necessarily, borrows from the conventions of print culture (and vice-versa as the two now coexist and are mutually informed by one another), C.T. Funkhouser has suggested that, because much

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early experimentation in computer literature, poetry and art took place offline in the pre-

Internet era (1959–1995), these practices of electronic expression were well-established

prior to the Internet and the textual operations it facilitated (195). Creative productions

have still not exploited the networked potential of online media in a way fully embraces

what Ted Nelson imagined with his “deeply intertwingled” Xanadu.36 While one can

detect intertwingled structures in non-literary uses of the Internet and other networked

digital systems (wiki servers, forums, meme building, etc.), creative productions have

not generally adopted this model. The scaffolding of authorship and accreditation that

has arisen out of print-centric practices make it difficult to develop literary models that

depart from the notion that both text and author are individual, self-contained units.

Even formally experimental works of digital literature and art typically default to

traditional modes of authorship.

In Electronic Literature, N. Katherine Hayles takes on the challenge of defining

electronic literature, offering up initially the Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO)

tautological description that it is a “work with an important literary aspect that takes

advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked

computer” (3). Dissatisfied with this definition, Hayles proposes that electronic literature

be thought of as “creative artworks [produced in electronic contexts] that interrogate the

histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of

literature proper” (4). In doing so, Hayles reformulates the field so that it is no longer

defined in technicist terms, but on the basis of a kind of self-reflexivity, imagining

36 See Theodor Holm Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974). For a discussion of the relationship between contemporary computer and network technologies to Nelson’s vision of a “deeply intertwingled” Xanadu, see Terry Harpold’s Ex-Foliations (45-80).

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electronic literature as those works which attend to their cultural and formal specificities,

within the specific medial condition of networks and digital representation.

In historical analyses of electronic literature, an aspect that may be omitted from

formal definitions of the literary but appears to have had considerable influence on the

formation of the field is the assumption that electronic literature is serious in its method

and aims. This is made patent in the marketing rhetoric for Eastgate Systems, an

influential early publisher of hyperfiction, which brands itself as offering “serious

hypertext.” Given the cultural impact of Eastgate in producing what has come to be

known as first-wave hyperfiction, one wonders if Hayles’s use of the term “literary” (or

“literature”) might be informally exchangeable with Eastgate’s “serious.”

Framed in this way, the rubric of electronic literature has come to be associated

with creative work done by a small coterie of artists and authors who have explored the

potential of networked and programmable media, and whose institutional setting is

outside of corporate and popular culture—not withstanding the fact that most electronic

artists frequently work to some degree within the confines of proprietary software.37

Seriality, the Literary and Database

Digital media embraces serial structures in many ways—as seen in blogs, webcomics, social networking sites, wiki servers, image forums, meme building and scoring systems in videogames—but the nature of the relationship between serialism and narrative continues to be relatively under-theorized. Marie-Laure Ryan's Avatars of

Story (2006), for example, is a noteworthy intervention in the field of digital narratology.

37 Florian Cramer suggests that the fact that software has become proprietary, ironically, is as a result of early experimentations by avant-garde electronic artists who determined the corporate pathways that new media would follow (273).

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Yet even her analysis, which updates older, largely print-based, Structuralist

narratological schemes (e.g., those of Gérard Genette, Gerald Prince, Seymour

Chatman, Mieke Bal, etc.) to include interactive, multimodal narratives, largely focuses

on stand-alone texts and ignores the specific conditions created by the relays between

multiple orders of temporality that are at work in a serial production. The effects of

temporal pauses in the distribution of a work can have significant effects on both the

structure of a narrative as well as its reception. While temporality is a narratological

category considered with respect to both diegetic time as well as actual reading

duration, the impact of serial reading practices on the production of narrative has

remained relatively unaddressed, even in discussions of serial literatures. This despite

the fact that, as Jennifer Hayward’s audience-focused study of seriality has shown,

different conceptual models of a text fall across class lines and shape different

consumption practices which in turn dramatically affects the way a work is interpreted

(37).38 That serial works have historically have been analyzed without attention to their

serial design has further placed this narrative device outside the scope of the literary.

Adding to the discussion of seriality and the literary in new media is an intersecting

issue of narrative’s relationship to the database. As Ed Folsom observes, “[w]hat we

used to call the canon wars were actually the first stirrings of the attack of database on

narrative” (1574).

38 Hayward’s highly revealing study of Dickens’s nineteenth century readers demonstrates the difference between his working class audience, which relied on the cheaper serial installments that were often read aloud, and the wealthier classes (who were also often his critics and reviewers) who frequently waited for the costlier complete volumes. Read privately and without forced pauses, this mode of consumption produced a very different relationship to the work from that of Dickens’s working class audience (See Hayward, p. 21-83).

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The agonistic relationship between database and narrative is a line of inquiry that was first raised by Lev Manovich in an essay for a special issue of AI and Society, followed by its publication as a chapter in his seminal The Language of New Media

(2001). Exceeding the technical definition of database which he describes as a

“structured collection of data” (218), Manovich suggests that the database aesthetic is not only a new genre established by new media, but, following Erwin Panofksy, a characteristic symbolic form for our age. Reminiscent of the ludology vs. narratology debates that took place within the field of game studies in the past two decades,

Manovich antagonistically frames database against narrative with his now notorious claim that “database and narrative are natural enemies”—a provocative position he himself never fully embraces in the chapter (225).

Since Manovich announced this antagonism between database and narrative, other critics have further developed his framework.39 The evolution of database technologies and debates concerning database’s relationship to narrative have some interesting implications for serial production. Serial narratives can be reconfigured in digital media since production is no longer bound to linear sequentiality or a single media mode. Reminiscent of my earlier discussion of Ong, seriality, and oral culture,

39 Victoria Vesna’s edited collection Database Aesthetics, which includes a version of Manovich’s essay “Database as Symbolic Form,” gathers an impressive group of digital media critics and artists charting the role of database within the arts and humanities. In a special section of the PMLA on the place of databases in humanist inquiry, Ed Folsom, N. Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann and Peter Stallybrass offer critiques and reformulations of Manovich’s argument. Hayles here as well as in other works reiterates her disagreement with Manovich’s adversarial rhetoric arguing instead that database and narrative should be viewed as “natural symbionts whose existence is inextricably entwined with that of its partner” (1606).

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Folsom proposes that “database may well be epic's new genre” (1578) demonstrating a

kinship between narrative aesthetics of oral and digital culture that exceed print forms.40

On the one hand, database, as has been seen in the development of recording

technologies, DVDs and online media, offer a greater sense of narrative accountability

and greater opportunity to follow an extended series. In this sense it is not that database

operations are inimical to narrative but that precisely on account of databases serial

narratives have been allowed to flourish in a new medial era, due to increased storage

and transmission capabilities of digital technologies. The more easily accessible a serial

object, the greater push for continuous, intertwined plots and large ensemble casts of

complex characters. (This can be seen, for example, in the boom of narratively-intricate

television serials (e.g., The Wire, 24)

On the other hand, database operations may also facilitate narrative

fragmentation, as the principal mode of organization need not be structured according

to a well-defined, single narrative sequence. Textual structures that depart from linear

modes of storytelling and destabilize temporality have been a common feature of

electronic literature from the early Storyspace hyperfictions of Eastgate Systems to

more recent online creative writing experiments in hypermedia (e.g., Judd Morrissey’s

Flash work The Jew’s Daughter).

Homestar Runner

A new media object positioned at the center of these engagements of database,

narrative and seriality is Homestar Runner, an ongoing webserial that exploits both the

archival, encyclopedic potential of database as well as the ability to restructure

40 In the final chapter dedicated to the online computer game Love, I will discuss the ways in this return can not only be understood in aesthetic, but also economic terms.

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narratives in non– or poly-linear forms. Developed in Adobe Flash, Homestar Runner is composed of a series of playable objects. These playable objects or narrative units are episodically updated to the website, and fall under a wide range of categories, accessible through submenus of the website. The ergodic aspect of these objects has become increasingly more important as the website has developed a more complex structure. Navigating the idiomatic graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of the site is an important aspect of its overall aesthetics, and key to its narrative production. Moreover, the animated shorts scattered over the website contain numerous Easter eggs encouraging the reader to actively mouse over the screen and a growing collection of standalone videogames are embedded within the diegesis.

Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel first created the characters of Homestar Runner for a children’s book. With his brother Matt Chapman, Mike Chapman would further develop the characters into the Flash animated universe of homestarrunner.com, which officially went online in 2000. The characters of Homestar Runner are neither Disney cute nor South Park crude, although comparisons are frequently made to the similarly flat, limited animation of Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s South Park television series. In a tradition of comics and animation, Homestar Runner’s more whimsical and surreal characters are impossible to locate along any realistic spectrum of age, and in some cases of sex. They perform innocence and experience in various degrees, functioning as polysemic signifiers that embrace these contradictory positions—a hybrid condition made possible by their status as purely cartoon constructs.

The eponymous Homestar Runner is the good-natured, yet dimwitted frontman of the cast. He is a slender, white creature with inexplicably invisible arms, no pants and a

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protruding ledge for a lower lip that may explain his speech impediment. Strong Bad is

Homestar’s antagonist – and the most popular personality on the website on account of the regular updates to the Strong Bad email series. He is a rotund, gruff figure with a bare chest, bizarre, vaguely Latino accent, boxing gloves for hands and a Mexican

Lucha libre wrestling mask for a face. Other main characters include Strong Bad’s brothers Strong Sad and Strong Mad, Bubs, Coach Z, Pom Pom, the King of Town, the

Poopsmith and, the one female, Marzipan (Figure 4-2).

Popular American children’s culture is extremely important to Homestar Runner, both in terms of the personalities of the characters as well as the Chapman brothers’ nostalgic relationship to these childhood objects. Artistic production and childhood-like imagination are frequently conflated on the site, as the characters’ creative play is the central premise through which new worlds and characters (or iterations of a core character) are established. Strong Bad for example, invents a dragon that becomes the villain of Peasant’s Quest, a parody of the early adventure game King’s Quest (1984).

Teen Girl Squad (Figure 4-3), initially developed as Strong Bad’s response to a fan email, is a series of animated doodles against a lined notebook paper background.

Minimalist and constrained in its aesthetic, Teen Girl Squad is Strong Bad’s depiction of teenage girl stereotypes. The short animated sequences represent a distilled form of seriality in that the conclusion of each episode arrives abruptly when Strong Bad

(displaying his predilection for gore and violence) finds a random way to kill off each of the characters. Naturally, they return unscathed and ready to repeat the formula at the beginning of each new episode. This recalls other animated series such as South Park

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and the early shorts of Aeon Flux in which characters are subject to a violent death only to inexplicably return in subsequent episodes.

The characters in Homestar Runner function as vehicles for creative invention and are regularly repurposed through the lens of various genres and media converting them into frame narratives (or alternately, one could argue a kind of database) for the proliferating narrative layers of the Homestar Runner storyworld. The characters become instruments for implementing a diegetic mise-en-abyme. For example, the serial iterations of Strong Bad include zombie, Atari and vector-graphics forms. A

Japanese anime version of a Strong-Bad-alternate-ego named “Stinkoman” has been converted into a Megaman-style video game. A surrealist-inspired version of Strong Bad sports a Casio VL-Tone keyboard for a head, and there is a grainy black and white version of Strong Bad that recalls early 20th century film and radio serials. Strong Bad stars as a 70s-style action hero named Dangeresque in homemade films (and subsequently Wiiware videogames). In the same way that Homestar Runner characters make believe to imagine themselves in a wide range of scenarios that transcend the generalized suburban landscape in which they appear to live, so too does the website function as a repository of media experiments and parodies. Flash and these surreal characters prove to be highly versatile tools for the website’s capacious formal experimentation.

What is created in one Homestar Runner episode will then be further developed and expanded upon in later episodes. Taken in whole, these episodes are elements of a serialized universe in which there is little linear narrative continuity. The website itself— one universe that is more medially than narratively consistent—substitutes narrative for

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an interlinking, database-driven structure that requires the reader to build a mental framework for conceptualizing the Homestar Runner world out of aggregates of the episodes. In this respect, Homestar Runner employs formal and textual devices that recall the serial constructs of the nouveau roman, while simultaneously operating within the tradition of serial periodicals, merging these two forms of seriality, which have been perceived as distinct from one another. Homestar Runner thus represents a narrative domain that bridges sequential, animated storytelling with an ergodic, database logic, in order to support a world that can only function within networked and programmable media because the logic of those media found its consistency. Its formal uniformity at the level of executable code and pixel makes for an enhanced form of repetition and standardization that recalls the process of file duplication. In Homestarrunner.com the logic of repetition is built into the website’s architecture through the use of fixed character models and looping animated sequences common to Flash.

Metaleptic Relays

Marie-Laure Ryan, working from Genette’s rhetorical definition of metalepsis, has described that structure as the folding of stacked narrative layers upon themselves. It is the “passage between levels that results in their interpenetration, or mutual contamination” (Avatars of Story, 207). Homestar Runner employs a versatile set of metaleptic devices, in which the stability between the various narrative orders is continually undermined by frequent intratextual relays and intertwined, polysequential structures. Multiple, self-reflexive GUIs embedded in the website create feedback loops between the various narrative and formal orders of the database.

The GUIs are not simply portals to access ‘real’ content, but are also part of the aesthetic experience of this self-contained online world, in which passage between

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textual layers is notably fluid.41 On the homepage, mousing over buttons will produce action and responses by the characters. There are currently over twenty skins for the main page—randomly generated when a user first accesses the page—which thematically relate to particular episodes housed within the website.

In this respect, the GUI of any one screen of the site can function as a character within the storyworld. At the end of early Strong Bad emails, for example, a drop down menu appears in the form of a sheet of perforated paper from a dot matrix printer that gives the user the option to repeat the email or return to the main page (Figure 4-4).

Strong Bad named this item “the paper” and it signals the closure of the email. The paper has a quirky personality and, in keeping with the ontology of computer printers, may or may not obey Strong Bad’s commands to drop down. This drop-down menu metaleptically integrates narrative with navigation. Similarly, the games menu that displays a selection of Homestar Runner games is not simply an archive, but behaves as a fixed screen, Space Invaders-style shooter game. To select a game the user shoots its icon, remediating the tropes and aesthetic of retrogaming in the menu.

While there are many other website-driven databases dedicated to serialized animation and webcomics, there are few that metaleptically integrate both the interface and multi-modal possibilities of Flash thoroughly into their construction. Ryan has commented on how uses of Flash have, thus far, been generally limited:

It is difficult to predict where narrative is heading in the age of Flash. Most applications so far have been minigames, purely visual works, random combinations of sound, text, or picture fragments known as “remixes,” “theoretical fictions” that privilege meta-textual comments at the expense of

41 The creators deliberately chose not to include external advertisements or pop-up ads that break the fourth wall of the Homestar Universe, instead opting for aesthetic consistency at the expense of commercial revenue.

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narration, concrete poetry, or visual adaptations of print poems. All we can say at the present time is that Flash narratives, because of the length restriction, will be neither the complex labyrinths of Storyspace nor the time- consuming quests of [Interactive Fiction]. (Avatars of Story,158-9)

Contrary to Ryan’s speculations concerning narrative in the age of Flash, the Chapman brothers have created a world that is as complex and labyrinthine as any work of literary hyperfiction of comparable scale. Working within the constraints and conditions of possibility afforded by Flash, the website has built a vast world: largely through the aggregate production of short, serial episodes in animated or videogame form. And this, in turn, has generated more extensive and complex associated texts.

Database + Narrative

As the Homestar Runner database has expanded, it is appropriate that the fans have reacted by producing, in turn, another database by which to manage the material.

The fan-created Homestar Wiki is an information database that is housed on an independent server and functions as a kind of metatext overlaying the original website.

The wiki includes over twenty-four hundred articles that analyze and comment on the website, collectively interpreting the jokes and references, writing a history of this universe as it develops. In narratological terms, the wiki has established the unstated elements of “story” or “fabula” according to which the curious user can access to gain a richer understanding of how the characters and world function. For example, a user could search the wiki in order to locate a chronological history of Teen Girl Squad or

Trogdor the dragon, so as to develop an understanding of how episodes and objects within the episodes may be interrelated. As the polylinear sequentiality of the website requires substantially more unpacking than sequential narratives that unfold along an

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unbroken temporal line, the task of collectively interpreting Homestar Runner’s grand narrative has been taken up by a collective readership on the wiki.

An established and continuing debate amongst narratologists has concerned the ontological status of “story.” Is there an essential narrative kernel that can be taken out of its medial context? As Seymour Chatman writes, the “transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium” (20). Like other narratologists of his era, Chatman tended to ignore the materiality of media by imagining narratives to have an almost transcendental underlying form. Chatman tended to ignore the materiality of media by imagining narratives to have an almost transcendental underlying form. On the opposite end of the debate are arguments that Ryan has termed “radical relativism,” in which the “toolbox of narratology must be rebuilt from scratch for every new medium” (Narratives across

Media, 34). Ryan proposes a model of narrative that navigates the conflict between medium specific and medium-blind analysis by defining narrative as a “a cognitive construct or mental image, built by the interpreter in response to the text” (Narratives across Media, 8).

This scholarly debate is not incidental to the Homestar Runner fan wiki, as it is deeply invested in the notion that there is a larger, coherent narrative suturing the seemingly fractured, non-sequential forms of discourse that make up the Homestar

Runner website. By attempting to fill in the causal gaps and to distill the elements of story, this paratextual object is itself creating another fiction via its cataloguing and explicating of the various narrative objects within Homestar Runner. In order to write

Homestar Runner’s narrative, the fans fall back on a database model to produce

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another object that is essentially a result of the collective “mental image” generated from the aggregate of their individual readings of the website.

The Melancholic Database

Manovich’s theory of database aesthetics is far more popular than his own projects in database cinema (what he has termed “soft cinema”). Perhaps as a consequence, the production of database cinema appears to have at this point remained largely confined to either museum and gallery video art or commercial marketing gimmicks. Although Homestar Runner does not identify itself under this term, it stands out as an example of a popular work that has successfully created a database narrative, chiasmically using both narrative as database and database as narrative.

Rather than viewing database and narrative as “natural enemies,” Homestar Runner comes closer to Hayles’s vision of database and narrative as “natural symbionts.”

As Daniel Punday has noted, a trait of this intersection appears to be a predisposition in database art towards the production of work that is distinctly melancholic in tone. He sees this substitution lyrical melancholy for sequential narrative as symptom of electronic literature more generally. In addition to the broad range of

Eastgate’s “serious” hypertext fictions, Manovich’s own Mission to Mars (2005) stands out as an example of this phenomenon. Manovich applies a database aesthetic to the work in order to represent the figure of an alien secret agent whose loss of identity

(referencing the immigrant experience of cultural dislocation and perhaps Manovich’s own emigration from the Soviet Union to the United States) reflects cultural alienation within a datascape that is beyond sequential navigation and narration. The narrative fragmentation of the database figures this condition of being lost in the space between differing cultures.

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Punday argues that “[e]motional involvement is especially important for the

interactive text because the user must be prompted to act and move through the text to

a degree not required by more traditional reading” (81). But why have so many

electronic artists chosen to substitute narrative progress with an emotional involvement

that is specifically in a minor key? Writing on his digital text The Impermanence Agent,

Noah Wardrip-Fruin has written “Whatever we may say about digital culture, it is always

time for something to die.” As will be reviewed in the subsequent chapter on the

relationship between the figure of the zombie and technology, a long critical tradition

associates inscription devices with death. 42

Working from Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) and the

writings of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Punday suggests that electronic

literature’s melancholy and loss of narrative progression is not only a convention, but

also a structural condition of digital writing in general. Using Abraham and Torok’s

framework, Punday describes the process of mourning as one of introjection and

melancholy as “incorporation,” a refusal “to transform the ego's investments and to

respond to a lost object” (128). Noting that new media has a complex relationship with

older aesthetic modes, Punday suggests that its remediating properties can be viewed

as a form of melancholic incorporation, in which new media works are “more likely to

adopt the mournful tone of working through the changes from one aesthetic medium to

42 André Bazin famously described film as “change mummified” (8) and Walter Ong notes that "[o]ne of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death" (81). Offering up a genealogy that traces the history of this relationship beginning with "Plato's charge that writing is inhuman, thing-like, and that it destroys memory," he concludes that "[t]he paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers" (81). Both Ong and Bazin describe one of the central structuring relations of writing as a kind of operation of the living dead.

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another” (98). From this psychoanalytic perspective, the database may be recognized as a kind of melancholy machine, creating an architecture which suspends and memorializes objects without properly attending to the situation of their initial loss.

Echoing this sentiment, Norman N. Klein describes the database anxieties of a post

9/11 world declaring: “The noisy era of data storytelling has begun. And it aches" (86).

Compared with hypertext fictions such as afternoon, a atory (1987) or Rand and

Robyn Miller’s classic point-and-click adventure game Myst (1993), Homestar Runner may seem an unlikely candidate for kinship in this affective family; on the surface it appears a bright, playful work. Yet its capacious absorption of media and pop culture makes use of an aesthetic strategy of database storytelling that is not immune to notable bouts of melancholia. The website’s backward glance at older media and genres, however ironic, is marked by a sense of longing not for these items as they were, but as they were imagined to be. While Homestar Runner lacks the specific mode of lyrical melancholia that Punday has identified in electronic literature of the Eastgate school, one could argue that the website’s nostalgic tone reflects an unresolved grieving for lost objects; specifically, a grieving for the cultural and technical imaginaries of the eighties and nineties (non-coincidentally coinciding with the artists’ own childhoods).

Moreover, given that the site’s characters are, unmistakably, figures of arrested development, Homestar Runner serves as a kind of reliquary of technologically and culturally obsolescent items. This reliquary is converted into a playground as these old media are remediated into Flash forms and re-envisioned so as to not produce original material but reinscribe utopian and nostalgic parodies.

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Terry Harpold has described the market-driven rhetoric of technological innovation and progress as the “conceits of the upgrade path” (3). As a result this lack of backwards compatibility and the constraints of proprietary software, many important works within the past fifty years have already been lost to history. Much recent new media scholarship has stressed the importance of returning to older technologies and earlier generations before they are irrecoverably lost, arguing that their significance was never fully processed in their own era. As Harpold has written, “I do not yet think we understood them well the first time or that we have discharged our responsibility to them” (2–3). Although new media historians and scholars may be making gestures towards recovering new media’s rapidly disappearing history, the current cultural climate remains under the spell of a dehistoricized upgrade path. A symptomatic response to this is perhaps that which Punday has identified as the melancholic strains of electronic literature. It is not just that media have come and gone, but that the conditions of their production were never fully assimilated even while here.

Functioning as a serial nostalgia engine, Homestar Runner manifests a deep unease with the upgrade path of history by fetishizing janky, atavistic technologies and cultural ephemera from popular media. Yet the serial form in which the website operates also places it firmly within an upgrade logic, as the regular additions mean that the website is continually in a process of transformation, as newer works inflect and supersede the old. One way the creators have addressed this tension is through Strong

Bad’s semi-regular upgrades of his computer hardware with slightly newer, but always still antiquated technology. Initially, Strong Bad writes his emails on a computer named the Tandy 400 (which resembles the Apple II, but takes its name from RadioShack’s

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Tandy series) and a dot matrix printer. Strong Bad accesses his email via a command line interface and progressively “upgrades” his computer to more recent, yet still comically obsolescent computers (Figure 4-5).

These replacements, in keeping with Strong Bad’s adolescent male personality, are typically the result of some plot device which results in the old computer violently exploding, resulting in a device that is beyond repair—this physical obliteration representing a process of cultural obliteration that occurs as new computers replace their earlier models. Notably, although Strong Bad discards his old computers with impunity, the broken technologies occasionally return from their garbage heap graves to haunt him, refusing to willingly submit to the upgrade path and be erased from his memory (Figure 4-6). These apparitions behave as a technological return of the repressed, a personification of Wendy Chun’s theory of the “undead of information” which will be discussed in further detail in the next chapter.

While Homestar Runner is by no means the only web serial, it joins complex issues of the literary and the database and demonstrates a way in which multi-modal storytelling and Flash animation are being used to create a rich, hypermediated experience that experiments with the tensions and possibilities of narrative and database. Being a work both of popular culture and about popular culture, it circulates within a different context from that of “serious” electronic literature. Yet, an analysis of its experimental formal and narrative devices reveals an underlying aesthetic of melancholy that connects it to other aesthetic traditions of digital production.

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FIGURES

Figure 4-1. Homestar Runner’s main menu (one of over twenty skins)

Figure 4-2. Homestar Runner’s main cast of characters

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Figure 4-3. Cartoons within cartoons: Teen Girl Squad

Figure 4-4. The “paper” metaleptically serves as menu and character

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Figure 4-5. Strong Bad upgrades his computer

Figure 4-6 The Tandy 400 haunts Homestar Runner

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CHAPTER 5 SERIAL DEATH AND THE ZOMBIE: NETWORKED NECRONOMICS

Whether one reads Blondie, views On Kawara’s paintings, or navigates Homestar

Runner’s melancholic database, the shadow of death is cast over seriality: this crossing of death and seriality is an irrepressible remainder even in those works which seem to propagate endlessly or grant characters eternal life. As I have suggested in earlier chapters, the insistence of the serial impulse can be read as a kind of death drive, compelled to simultaneously repeat as well as return us to a place that forces us into a confrontation with our own mortality. And if there is one monster that perfectly embodies this serial death drive, it is the modern figure of the zombie. Not dead, but undead, the zombie rises from death as a figure of the most mechanical of repetitions. In this chapter I will discuss the way in which the zombie, both narratively and formally, functions as a serial construct. My study will begin with a history of the zombie, tracing its infections and mutations over the eighty years has played an increasingly prominent role in North American culture and media. The chapter will then culminate with a reading of a videogame series Left 4 Dead (2008-2009), which works through the different historical traditions of the zombie and makes use of a variety of serial operations that shape both the way in which the game is played, and, by implication, produced.

The zombie is a particularly fascinating figure as it is imbricated in multiple logics of serial proliferation, both biological and technological. As I will review later in the chapter, there is a deep connection between historical plague narratives and zombie narratives. Moreover, the zombie conflate the episodic trajectory of biological plague with the episodic production of media. Zombie films, games, comics, and literature

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frequently act as a mirror of their subject, proliferating with a serial contagiousness. The zombie genre has always been particularly prone towards remakes and sequels, but in a post-9/11 climate of fear, we have seen the zombie increasingly appropriated as a means of mediating contemporary social, political, and economic anxieties.

By conducting a close reading of the video game series Left 4 Dead, I will demonstrate how the video game makes use of two related serial logics: that of the zombie, which is a product of biological and technological patterns of repetition, as well as the serial operations of the computer. While zombie-related media, and specifically videogames, are hardly unusual, Left 4 Dead stands out as it successfully weaves together multiple versions of the zombie with the serial structures that govern production and reception of the game. As we will see, as the zombie spreads into different forms, it adapts to its medial contexts. In the case of Left 4 Dead, multiple histories of the zombie are channeled into the figure—both with respect to its film history (specifically the legacy of George Romero’s walking dead) as well as its roots in early Haitian voodoo. The

Haitian zombie is particularly seen in the second installment of the series, set in the southern United States. Left 4 Dead’s zombie takes on even greater political potency when we examine the relationship between the representation of zombie in the game and the underlying gameplay mechanics that structure the game and the metagaming practices that surround Left 4 Dead. While videogame players are often pejoratively described as zombies, hypnotized by the screen, I will argue that there is a different kind of truth to this statement. While the player herself is not literally one of the undead horde, in Left 4 Dead, a networked, online game, the player’s labor is zombified. It is

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harnessed and placed back into the production cycle for the videogame developers as a

direct result of the game’s serial mode of distribution and mode of play.

The History of the Zombie

From their early roots in Caribbean voodoo to their popularity in Hollywood

cinema, zombies have infected all areas of life.43 They can be seen in video games, on

hacked electronic road warning signs,44 hard drives, and even in international politics.

Responding to the incredible popularity as well as metaphorical fungibility of the zombie,

a growing body of zombie scholarship, particularly in film studies, has started to

emerge. Like the zombie itself, the field of zombie studies has evolved over time,

generating a steadily growing critical canon, especially in the last decade. The first wave

of zombie scholarship consisted mainly of film surveys such as Jamie Russell’s Book of

the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (2005), Glenn Kay’s Zombie

Movies: The Ultimate Guide (2008), and Peter Dendle’s The Zombie Movie

Encyclopedia (2000). These texts rigorously attempt to classify the zombie genre—

using telling expressions such as ultimate, complete, and encyclopedic in their titles.

They are fueled by an ambitious desire to establish a totalizing catalogue of existing

zombie films—a challenge which appears to be impossible, given the number of such

films (which increases annually) and the ambiguities and inconsistencies of popular

representations of the figure.

43 For a more developed survey of the history of the zombie in film and media, see Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture (forthcoming).

44 Gainesville, Florida along with other U.S. cities such as Austin, TX and Portland, OR had their electronic road signs hacked to warn commuters of zombie attacks (see McGraw, Gosling, and Byrnes and Voyles).

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Most academic scholarship on the zombie owes a significant debt to the work of

Robin Wood, whose foundational essay on films about the living dead from the 1970s and ‘80s mark some of the earliest critical analyses. Wood identifies the way in which the films critique “normality”—the undermining of the heteronormative family and racial, gender and sexual roles as well as the way in which zombies function as a critique of commodity fetishism and consumer capitalism. The influence of Wood’s approach can be discerned in the rise of more focused and tactical approaches to the zombie in (for example) Kyle Bishop’s American Zombie Gothic (2010), Kim Paffenroth’s Gospel of the

Living Dead (2006), and critical anthologies such as Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet

Lauro’s Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human (2011), and

Shawn McIntosh and Marc Leverette’s Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead

(2008).

The zombie metaphor has been exhaustively appropriated to signify the most pressing cultural anxieties. The zombie can be queer, abject, subaltern, racialized, gendered, and lumpen. Fueled by apocalyptic visions of terrorism, environmental disaster, outbreaks of new disease, and economic collapse, the zombie serves as an influential, even productive force in the struggle to imagine a future past these forms of global breakdown.

The zombie has always been a politicized figure and although it’s shape has transformed through the decades, many of the core issues surrounding it persist from the zombie’s earliest appearances in American culture. The evolution of the modern figure of the zombie can be roughly regarded as having occurred over three generations: that of the Haitian voodoo zombie, George Romero’s living dead, and the

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humans with a rabies-like disease who behave as if they were living dead, as seen in the films 28 Days Later (2002), its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), and videogame series such as Resident Evil (1996-2009) and more recently, Left 4 Dead.

Unlike the vampire, another highly popular undead ghoul, the zombie does not have a long literary tradition preceding its emergence in film. Its origins lie in Haitian voodoo practices, made known through early twentieth-century English-language reports, most notably William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929). The voodoo zombie is under the control of a witch doctor who resurrects the body from its grave. While the zombie has an enviable semiotic plasticity, the early voodoo zombie foregrounds issues surrounding race and labor. The Haitian zombie is deeply embedded within the historical imaginaries of slavery and colonialism, with the witch doctor who controlled an army of undead labor serving as a displacement of Haiti’s actual colonial masters. As

Jennifer Fay writes, “zombies are a modern industrial practice of occupation culture whereby the more enterprising Haitians enslave the cadavers of their countrymen” (90).

One of Seabrook’s most often-cited passages describes this form of the zombie as it has come to be popularly understood:

Obediently, like an animal, he slowly stood erect—and what I saw then, coupled with what I heard previously, or despite it, came as a rather sickening shock. The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there were nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but also incapable of expression. (101)

It was not until the 1980s that anthropologist Wade Davis attempted to find a scientific explanation for the process of zombification and proposed that zombies were an actual human phenomenon – not undead, but living persons placed in a state of chemically- induced suggestibility, akin to hypnosis. His findings were published in the popular book

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The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985). Jamie Russell has argued that “if the riddle of the

living dead had been solved sooner, the zombie would have never taken root in the

imagination of the Western world” (14).

A few years after Seabrook published his account, the Halperin brothers

popularized his depiction of the zombie in their film White Zombie (1932). One of its

most chilling scenes depicts zombified workers laboring in a sugar mill. Whether

hypnotized by the villainous master and magician (played by Bela Lugosi) or the

machinery itself, the Haitian workers are so alienated and oblivious to their surroundings

that they continue to mill undisturbed as one of their cohort falls into the grinder they are

operating. Responding to these representations, Fay argues that “Circulation of zombie

fantasies in the United States was, in some sense, both an admission and denial that

U.S. policy in Haiti resurrected a colonial, even slave economy” (93).

The Haitian zombie was not only an expression of anxieties resulting from the

brutal U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), but for American audiences, the

enslavement of the zombies at the hand of a witchdoctor depicted a kind of mechanical

servitude that resonated with the ‘Modern Times’ of twentieth-century industrialism and

the instrumentalization of the work force.45

Although at this point, the zombie itself was not yet depicted as a viral creature

(this transformation would only occur with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead

[1968]), the film did produce a spate of other films in this emerging genre. Predictably,

as individuals raced to cash in on a profitable monster, there was an attempt to claim

45 Yet, as indicated by the title White Zombie, the true horror presented is not simply that of zombified labor. The even more chilling disruption to the social order is the exploitation of white (and feminine) zombified labor as the central victim in the film is Madeline Parker (played by Madge Bellamy).

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ownership over it. Thus, in 1936 the Amusement Securities Corporation, the owners of

White Zombie, sued to block another Halperin film from being released with the word

“zombie” in its title (“Suit over ‘Zombie’ Films,” 1936). The plaintiffs claimed the word was their intellectual property (despite the fact that they themselves were appropriating it from a longstanding cultural heritage). This attempt by the American Securities

Corporation to set legal limits on the proliferation of the zombie in mass culture was unsuccessful.

Influenced as much by the Haitian zombie as by Richard Matheson’s short vampire novel, I Am Legend (1954) and emotionless replicas that spawn in The

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Romero removed the witch doctor, turned the ghouls into flesh-eaters, and relocated the zombie into a North-Eastern American setting. In Night of the Living Dead a diverse group of individuals barricade themselves in a farmhouse and while the zombie’s outside constitute a horrible threat, the even greater danger appears to be the conflicts—class, racial, and family—that arise between the small band survivors.

This new kind of masterless, infectious zombie would be the subject of countless series, remakes, and sequels, both official and unofficial, which have followed over the succeeding five decades. The blurring of social boundaries that critics frequently point to as part of the implicit political commentary of zombie films is further reinforced by the complex, interpenetrated genealogies of the Romero (and post-Romero) zombies.

Much like White Zombie, Romero’s film was similarly haunted by legal battles.

Night of the Living Dead was famously the victim of an intellectual property error which resulted in the film entering the public domain when the distributor, the Walter Reade

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Organization, forgot to add a copyright notice after making changes to the title screen. A financial blow for Romero, this led to the dissemination of the film through multiple distributors, widespread copying and informal distribution that made the film better known than it otherwise would have been. It is likely that the release of Night of the

Living Dead into the public domain contributed to the massive growth in popularity of

Romero’s zombies.

Another split in zombie mythology occurred as a result of a disagreement between

Romero and John A. Russo, co-writer of Night of the Living Dead. The outcome of the conflict was that Russo retained the rights to the phrase “Living Dead,” whereas

Romero could only use “Dead” in the films that would follow. Dawn of the Dead (1978),

Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and

Survival of the Dead (2009) were not properly narrative sequels, but the series of films created an informal trajectory of events during the zombie apocalypse depicted in the original film. Films with the “Living Dead” tag, originally conceived as direct sequels in content (treating the original 1968 film as a docudrama) and functioning as mostly comedic spin-offs, include Return of the Living Dead, parts one through five. In Europe, another zombie series was spawned when Italian director Lucio Fulci released Zombi 2

(1979), a somewhat disingenuous attempt to cash in on the European popularity of

Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which was released under the title Zombi in Italy. (Further

Italian sequels followed.) Finally, there have been Romero-approved remakes of Night of the Living Dead (1990), Dawn of the Dead (2004), and Day of the Dead (2008). The genealogy of the zombie film, from Halperin, to Romero, Russo, Fulci and beyond, can

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be more accurately represented by a web of self-referential textuality than by a typical

family tree.

This pattern is further reflected in the recent trend of mashing up zombies with

other, often more established, literary or cinematic genres. There are numerous films

based on genre-crossing gimmicks such as zombies + Nazis or zombies + strippers.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) advertises itself as a zombie romantic comedy (a “zom-rom-

com”) and Seth Grahame-Smith’s mashup of Jane Austen with zombie conventions in

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) was a New York Times bestseller. The now

commonly accepted conventions of zombieism functions virally as the zombie is

inserted into other genres.

While economic and legal interests have intervened, attempting to quarantine the

circulation of this powerful signifier, its very nature seems to resist these efforts. The

serial contagiousness of the zombie, its complex structure of branching sequels and

spin-offs and ability to aggressively invade other genres, appears to have given the

figure immunity against the claims of proprietary ownership.

Going Viral

An important recent version of the zombie could be characterized as the “digital

zombie,” blending a technological as well as biological concept of the viral.46 The terror

of the slow, lumbering living dead—who individually were clumsy and weak yet

collectively could bring about a worldwide apocalypse—was reimagined along a more

explicitly biological model of viral infection. While Romero-style zombies were deployed

46 Elsewhere with Wylie Lenz I have undertaken a closer examination of this typology, contrasting the quick and mortal zombies exemplified by the digital video 28 Days Later with the “analog” zombies of George Romero’s breed of living dead. We argue that these typological differences are deeply wedded to the respective media in which they are represented. See Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz. “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.2 (2010): 127–148.

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as a (sometimes forced) didactic critique of consumption and capital, the latest version of the zombie reflects the ever-accelerating conditions of late capitalism in an even more tightly networked global media landscape.

This latest version of the zombie has produced some contention among critics over the fact that these walking dead are not, strictly speaking, zombies: that they move quickly and are not actually dead. Yet, intriguingly, if we think about the nature of a virus—as the contest form of life that produces this new form of zombie—there may be less of a gap between these “living” and “dead” variants than initially thought. The virus resides, according to scientists, somewhere between life and death. Whether or not a virus is a form of “life” has been strongly debated by scientists for the past few decades.

According to virologist Norman Pirie: “Now, however, systems are being discovered and studied which are neither obviously living nor obviously dead, and it is necessary to define these words or else give up using them and coin others” (Villareal 104). Perhaps the term “zombie” is an attempt to seek out a new language for expressing these ideas in popular culture. What is perhaps most uncanny about the virus is that it appears to contain, much like the supernatural zombie, the powers of resurrection:

Because viruses occupy a netherworld between life and nonlife, they can pull off some remarkable feats. Consider, for instance, that although viruses ordinarily replicate only in living cells, they also have the capacity to multiply, or ‘grow,’ in dead cells and even to bring them back to life. Amazingly, some viruses can even spring back to their ‘borrowed life’ after being destroyed. […] Viruses are the only known biological entity with this kind of ‘phoenix phenotype’—the capacity to rise from their own ashes.” (104)

Both zombie and virus hold similar resurrection powers and occupy a liminal status between life and death. Thus, the viral zombie does not replace the older style of zombie as much as find a way to reconfigure it in the light of new scientific discourses

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surrounding infection and evolution (the fundamental role of the virus in the evolution of life is only now starting to be understood). Not only does the viral zombie retain characteristics of undeath, but it taps into deeply felt post-AIDS, SARS, Bird Flu, and

H1NI anxieties surrounding global pandemic. In this way, the zombie has been rationalized and assigned a pathology, paradoxically making a zombie outbreak no longer seem an outlandish fantasy, but an event that is in some form actually possible.

This accelerated and specifically-pathologized zombie has been not only transformed for the age of digital reproduction – the disease spreading with the speed of an electronic chain letter – but the threat it poses as a biohazard also explicitly links the zombie to a much older tradition of infection, that of plague writing. As the zombie moves between various degrees of supernatural and viral, this only further links it to the long tradition of plague. What is particularly striking is the way in which this link is established through violence. René Girard has further suggested that plague, in its literary and mythic representations, stands in as a metaphor for reciprocal violence

(836). The modern zombie personifies the movement of plague, spreading infectious violence and thus literalizing Girard's allegory. (The film 28 Days Later exemplifies this conflation of a zombie plague with reciprocal violence most completely.)

In his description of plague, Antonin Artaud does not regard it as a disinterested force of nature, but ascribes an agency to it, suggesting that plague has a deliberate

“preference for the very organs of the body, the particular physical sites, where human will, consciousness, and thought are imminent and apt to occur” (21). His description of plague’s de-subjectivizing power, the way in which it infects those organs that lie at the very core of an individual’s identity, uncannily anticipates the way in which zombie

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violence is persistently focused on and around the brain. As Lauro and Karen Embry have observed elsewhere, those “brain-dead” “brain-eater[s]” can only be killed by destroying the very organ that is the object of their inhuman appetite (105).

A zombie outbreak, much like a plague epidemic, is an event in which the anxieties associated with social connectivity come to the fore—the more that boundaries between self and other are broken down in plague time, the more the contagion spreads. Here, Girard’s description of plague seems equally applicable to zombies: “The plague is universally presented as a process of undifferentiation, a destruction of specificities” (833). In zombie films, the collapse of barriers and the attendant social leveling that takes place are embodied through the piercing of uninfected skin and the exchange of infectious fluids, which results in the conversion of all hosts of the infection into a homogenous, undifferentiated mass. Jeffrey Weinstock has argued that the concurrent development of both AIDS and the computer virus as significant dangers to the public were not coincidental but part of a general “virus culture” that overtook the United States at the end of the last millennium, creating “a landscape obsessed with the fear of contagion, infected with ‘infection paranoia’” (83).

He observes that mechanical and biological modes of infection are interchangeable, in the landscape, and that this produced anxieties regarding a post-human condition in which “it is so difficult to figure the computer virus in other than biological terms: in contemporary culture, the body is technologized, the body is a machine” (90).

The zombie literally wears its politics on its sleeve, not only troubling notions of identity and distinctions between subject and object, but these relations are manifested through the most excessively gory scopic regime: internal and external are

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indistinguishable on a zombie body composed of exposed internal organs and dangling flesh (a kind of corporeal Moebius strip). At the same time, the zombie (if we use

Weinstock’s description of virus culture) is simultaneously a figure of pure automation, of programmed memory that infinitely loops. This undead creature is at once horribly animal, horribly machinic, and yet neither of these in the way in which they were formerly defined. In both respects, whether it is the visual regime of gore or the infinite loop of zombie time, we see how rooted the history is in not only plague, but also the language of film.

The connection between the spread of information and fictional/biological forms of plague, between form and content, is not restricted to the twenty-first century. Daniel

Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a text which itself maintains a similarly porous boundary between fact and fiction, reflects a similar relationship between plague and rhetoric. Once again, as I have discussed in earlier chapters, the newspaper becomes a central figure for modeling serial operations. On the very first page of

Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe writes of how, before the emergence of newspapers,

“things did not spread instantly over the whole Nation, as they do now” (5). The development of the newspaper produced a paradigm shift that accelerated the dissemination (and confusion) of information via this emergent medial form. Twenty-first century digital and social media may circulate on a level of near-instantaneity that Defoe could have never imagined, but rumor and plague are conflated in both contexts.

Accompanying the outbreak of actual infection is typically a surge in informational and network anxieties. For example, during the recent H1N1 flu crisis, the ability of emerging social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to convey misinformation and

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rumor became as important an issue for health agencies as was the medical control of the virus within physical populations. Bringing the two intertwined concerns together, one media analyst commented that proper scrutiny of a new source before re-linking it on a social networking site was the “online equivalent of washing your hands. … Before you pass [an article] on, wash your hands a little” (Sutter). Whether eighteenth century newspaper or contemporary social media, in each of these instances, the rhetoric surrounding infection circulates according to a model of textual contagion.

An interesting discovery that confirms this pattern was made during the H1N1 epidemic. Google was able to accurately predict sites of outbreak using aggregated data of global flu and flu-related searches. The predictive ability of their search was so successful that http://www.google.org/flutrends/ was established as a way for the public to monitor sites of actual flu outbreak. The relationship between public discourse and public health, between viral media and viral outbreak, were not treated as parallel processes, but in fact deeply intertwined, if not mutually constitutive. Google Flu Trends asserts that there is an indexical relationship between naming and the progress of the physical virus itself. Oddly enough, these advancements in analytic technology resonate with older beliefs about plague in which plague writing (specifically the material on which it was printed) was regarded as a bearer of the disease. As they circulated, these texts were ascribed the power to not only infect readers with their ideas, but the physical disease itself (Gilman 97).47

Thus, zombies have the characteristic of both plague as a disease (with a range of social and historical consequences) and a condition of writing (wth related

47 For a history on this complex inter-relationship between textuality and plague, see Ernest P. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

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consequences within the field of media). Its patterns of repetition and recirculation are seen not only in the zombie’s bodily infectiousness, but in the recurring return of the living dead, the return of the return as seen in the serial repetition of the zombie in the many interconnected sequels, series and spinoffs of film, comics, text, and videogame zombie genres. Elana Gomel, examining not the literal zombie, but its precursor in the form of a plague body, argues in her excellent essay that plague “is governed by the logic of repetition. The chain of death grows by addition of more and more identical links” (24). Noting the uniform and episodic structure that characterizes most plague narratives, Jennifer Cooke reiterates this point by coining the term “episodemic” as a way of describing the serial form of plague narratives (22). The complex and interpenetrated genealogy of zombie cultural and media production follows a logic of contagion and compulsive repetition. Since Freud, repetition and the death drive have been conceptually linked, and this logic is reflected in the narratives as well as the systems of production and reproduction of zombie media.48 A zombie narrative generally depicts a serial process of infection, by means of which much of humanity is systematically transformed into zombies. The living are compelled towards this condition of permanent inertia, a perpetual motion of (animated) inanimate matter, mirroring Freud’s notion of the death drive as the desire for life to return to its original inert and inanimate state (“the aim of all life is death”); the zombie is in this respect the contemporary epitome of the repeating dead.17 The structures of repetition governing the production of zombie media itself and the sheer excess of material available

48 See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989). See also Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of the relationship between the Freudian death drive, memory, and repetition in the introduction to Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994).

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demonstrate that this death drive economy, this process of becoming-zombie, functions

as an affirmative and generative force. Zombie films beget more zombie films. Zombie

video games rarely stop with a one sequel, not to mention the mods, fanfiction, and

remakes for other consoles and programming languages that comprise a lively

participatory fan culture based around death.

It is evident, then, that the zombie does not just function as a metaphor for

contemporary cultural debate and conflict, standing in for whatever is the most pressing

cultural anxiety, but it is metaphor—a kind of walking meta-metaphor, and a self-

reflexive metonym for the media through which it circulates. Whether chirographic or

print writing, photography, film, video or networked and programmable media, scholars

have deployed the rhetoric of the monstrous, the viral, and the undead in order to

theorize informational media.49 Consider Wendy Chun’s observation that “Digital media

networks are not based on the regular obsoleteness or disposability of information but

rather on the resuscitability or the undead of information” (171). In other words, digital

is hard to kill—even when permanent erasure is desired, information—whether a

deleted text message or passing Facebook comment—has a way of being resurrected

and recirculated in new and unanticipated contexts. It is perhaps the accelerated

obsolescence and perceived ephemerality of digital culture (Chun describes this

condition as an “enduring ephemeral”[167]) that makes data’s return all the more

powerful, and which joins its errant endurance to the figure of the zombie.50

49 See Boluk and Lenz, specifically p. 145–146, for further discussion of the relationship between the circulation of media and ontologies of the living dead.

50 The relationship of the zombie to concepts such as Chun’s “undead of information” is not unique to the digital field. Writing has been assigned a similarly undead ontology traceable through a long line of philosophers and theorists going back to Plato (for more information, see Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, specifically 78–82). Derrida has invoked rhetoric similar to

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Digital Seriality

With the importation of zombies into videogames from film, a different set of issues take a central focus. The videogame stands as a perfect habitat for zombies as its governing logic is determined by a kind of undead repetition. Not only are our avatars are ongoingly dying and resurrecting, but in order to be successful in many games we must train our brains to forget individual iterations of play. This allows our bodies to remember gameplay sequences and program reflex actions and multiple button combinations so it is programmed in our muscle memories. Essentially we zombify our behavior within each iteration of play through repetition of specific, stereotyped forms of play.

In computing generally, seriality is a product of both the formal logic of information encoded via binary digits and the limitations of the human-computer interface (HCI).

Videogames operate as an ideal medium for expressing as well as critiquing such serial structures that define both software environments as well as the quotidian, repetitive rhythms of human existence. In philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre employed the concept of seriality to model an individual’s relationship to serially aggregable group formations, a kind of proto-network theory. For Sartre, seriality is a condition of modernity describing individual disempowerment. The kind of anomistic repetition Sartre saw as a defining element in contemporary culture can be compared with certain forms of gameplay—

Chun’s when he speaks of the “reanimation of knowledge” in his discussions of “dead” writing versus “the living spoken word” (79). Theorists have applied this rhetoric not only to writing, but to film as well. André Bazin famously defines (analog) film as “change mummified” (15). He describes the physical process of capturing motion pictures as an act which “embalms time.” (14). The indexical trace that light leaves on photosensitive paper transforms the moving picture into a kind of mechanical reanimator of the dead image. The zombie’s historically privileged medium of film is itself undead, yet decaying. Film is time, zombified.

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imagine, for example, how many millions of identical Marios have jumped over the first mushroom in Super Mario Bros. since it was first released in 1985.

Sartre first defined seriality in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), arguing that urban and industrial life simultaneously isolated individuals while forcing them into group arrangements. The man reading the newspaper while waiting for the bus to go to work was Sartre's principle case study. He paints a portrait of the man in the grey flannel suit who, everyday, becomes part of a series of other individuals also waiting for the bus.

Although each individual experiences waiting for the bus uniquely, together, they form a generalized pattern of repetition that places them in relation to a totality. Yet each individual does not necessarily perceive his or her waiting as part of this series or network. As Sartre writes "thus, as an appearance and a first abstraction, a structure of universality really exists in the grouping; indeed, everyone is identical with the Other in so far as they are waiting for the bus. However, their acts of waiting are not a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act" (252). Early videogames were a product of this Sartrean mode, requiring actions to be repeated in isolation, yet always remaining part of an ineffable whole, in Sartre’s language a

“transcendent unity” (262). Sartre critiques the way in which modern life is composed of these serial operations. Our inability to grasp our relationship to these generalized abstractions and our status as Othered objects is how, for Sartre, seriality results in the effect of urban alienation. Gameplay in early videogames demonstrated operations of this Sartrean mode, requiring actions to be repeated in isolation, yet always remaining part of an ineffable whole, in Sartre’s language a “transcendent unity” (262).

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In a contemporary context, the man holding a newspaper while waiting for the bus or train has been replaced by the man fiddling with a smart phone, e-book, or Game

Boy. In the same way there was an irony to Sartre's man using the newspaper—a medium well suited to providing a feeling of collectivity and participation within the imagined community of the nation—as a tool for creating a mental barrier against his fellow traveling companions, so do cell phones and videogame consoles play a similar contradictory role. As Sartre writes:

These are operations for making the transition from one group to another (from the intimacy of the family to the public life of the office) [...] to isolate oneself by reading the paper is to make use of the national collectivity and, ultimately, the totality of living human beings, in so far as one is one of them and dependent on all of them, in order to separate oneself from the hundred people who are waiting for or using the same vehicle. (258)

Writing in an era prior to the emergence of digital, global networks, Sartre grasped the paradox of serial operations and their capacity to simultaneously assure an individual's segregation in the very moment of connecting him or her with a network of representations.

Sartre's critique of seriality resonates with the approaches of contemporary media theorists to network technology. Sherry Turkle’s “alone together” thesis in Alone

Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011) practically elevates the patterns of social estrangement that Sartre described over fifty years ago to the level of a national youth crisis. In Connected, or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society (2010), Steven Shaviro aptly frames the fundamental contradictions of seriality in his description of networks: "Indeed, our being each alone, rigidly separated from one another, is a necessary condition for our being able to log on to the same network" (29). Sartre's attempt to frame a kind of line of flight outside of

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these serial contradictions of daily life is echoed in the work of contemporary network theory to find a way of navigating what have become incredibly powerful systems of control. "In today's conventional wisdom, everything can be subsumed under a warm security blanket of interconnectivity. But this same wisdom hasn't yet indicated quite what that means, nor how one might be able to draft a critique of networks," write

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker (26). While Galloway and Thacker are at a loss with how to find a way out of the network and the ubiquity of the zombie appears to be another way in which this anxiety towards networked culture is expressed. The zombie is what disrupts the network’s warm security blanket of interconnectivity. The zombie exposes the internal threat of a globalized, networked world.

Left 4 Dead: Serial Killers

The videogame series Left 4 Dead takes this position as a point of departure, combining the serial logic of networked and programmable media with the multiple, interlaced traditions of the zombie. Left 4 Dead was first launched by Valve Corporation in 2008 and a sequel was released the following year. The basic scenario of the online game is that a party of four players must fight off waves of attacking zombie hordes as they travel from safehouse to safehouse. The player controls a first-person avatar and navigates the three-dimensional geography. With the possible exception of Nazis, zombies are one of the most popular humanoid enemies in videogames. Since killing a zombie is a necessity, not a choice, it allows a player to indulge in the most brutal fantasies without any potential guilt over the ethical ramifications of their actions.51 The

51 Left 4 Dead 2 in particular produced some controversy prior to its release as its original version was banned in Australia and Germany for excessive violence and realism. In Australia, there is no game rating for specifically mature (i.e. adult-only) audiences and so Valve redesigned the box art and some of the game’s content so that it could receive a “15+” rating. The debate recalls some of the old comic book

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Left 4 Dead series, however, stands apart from the horde of zombie video games

available as its distinctive features such as cooperative, networked play and clever

artificial intelligence form a critical feedback loop between form and content. The

seriality of the zombie is complemented by its status as a serial game. Once the game

is installed, the user becomes plugged into a complex set of gameplay analytics. Much

like the Haitian zombie, the player’s labor takes on a new life as it is appropriated and

put into the service of the game’s development.

Among Left 4 Dead’s unique features is that it requires teamwork (even other

zombie games that have multiplayer capabilities are not designed so an individual must

play with other players, whether human or computer-controlled).52 For example, one of

the special classes of “boss” infected—that is, the particularly challenging zombies

against which players struggle—is named the Smoker. The Smoker extends a long,

serpentine tongue to trap a player. The player cannot free herself once captured, but

must wait to be rescued by another player. This forces the group to stick close together

and be vigilant not only for their own safety, but their teammates. The inability of groups

to function efficiently as a team (itself a common trope of zombie films) frequently

results in every player’s death. While the game itself has minimal narrative, the human

drama that characterizes many zombie films is staged through the interactions between

self-censorship issues that arose through the implementation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) by the comics industry. This system, which did not allow for a sliding system that permitted adult content, resulted in the ghettoization of comics the by permanently tying them to children’s culture. For further discussion of the arrested conditions of comics after the acceptance of the CCA see Amy Kiste Nyberg’s Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (1988).

52 Aside from the cooperative campaign mode, there is a versus mode in which four players are pitted against another team of four playing in which the two groups alternate between playing the survivors and the infected. One group will play the survivors and the other control the special classes of infected zombies (Smoker, Hunter, Tank, Boomer, Spitter, Charger, and Jockey) which have unique attributes that can more quickly incapacitate the survivors.

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players. The ease with which it is possible to be overrun (often accompanied by

stereotypical “horror” theme music to intensify the action) can produce charged

exchanges between the four players who have many options for either directly or

indirectly communicating with each other. They can use a series of quick voice

commands spoken by their avatar selected from a pop-up radial menu or the chat

function that is built into the game (for better quality players will sometimes use other

voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP] software). To assist players in communicating with

each other, the survivors will also provide information (e.g., “Pills here,” “Weapons over

here”) when something occurs that is valuable to the team without any player input.

The first game in the series is set in a fictionalized Pennsylvania while the second

is set in the southern United States. The game opens with an introductory cut-scene,53 but then the story is mostly told using narrative techniques established by Valve’s earlier series Half-Life, particularly Half-Life 2, in which the graphics technology allowed for a much higher level of environmental detail. Left 4 Dead was conceived as a means of adapting Half-Life 2’s single player experience for multiplayer modes. During a campaign, there is never a text bubble or cinematic sequence which, as is the case in many other videogames, interrupt the gameplay in order to develop the story, but the player slowly learns about the events and the relationship between the characters through fragmented bits of information discovered in-game. She can read the writing hastily scribbled on walls and the headlines of newspapers and PSAs that have been

53The opening film functions as a non-interactive tutorial which trains the player in the game’s mechanics without having an in-game training session. For example, you see the various special infected and can learn some strategies for dealing with them. The deliberate lack of training furthers the design goal of making the start of a campaign feel as if the player was simply dropped in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The short cinematic at the start softens this transition, but for the most part the player must adapt and pick up the rules as she plays.

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posted (Figure 5-1). There are snippets of audio playing in derelict bars and alleyways

and players camp out in the abandoned apartment flats and motor homes of possible

escapees. The story is not told to her directly, but the player is thus able to glean a

narrative through exploration of the storyworld. The voice-acted in-game chatter that

occurs between player-characters also may contribute some insight into the storyworld.

Thousands of lines of prerecorded can pop up at specific locations and during particular

events in the game.

Unlike Frankenstein or the vampire, the zombie is one of the undead monsters of

early horror without a literary precedent, making it a primarily visual and uniquely

cinematic phenomenon. Because much of the contemporary zombie’s heritage

(particularly its origins in African and Caribbean culture) has been obscured, Steven

Shaviro argues in The Cinematic Body that “the living dead don't have an origin or a

referent; they have become unmoored from meaning” (84). Perhaps it is on account of

the fact that the zombie has lost its historical frame of reference that is so deeply

wedded to the logic of film. It is no coincidence that the video game itself does not

attempt to present an immersive realism, but a form of immersion rooted in a specifically

filmic realism.54 The player is framed as an actor, controlling one of the four survivors.

The load screen of each campaign features a poster that shows both the names of the

avatar and the username of the four players who “star” in the episode. Each campaign

or level is given a punning, B-movie-inspired film title like “No Mercy,” “Hard Rain,” and

“Swamp Fever” which describe each “film’s” scenario (e.g. seeking out and then

54 In this situation, I am understanding “realism” not as being defined by a fixed set of aesthetic principles or an indexical relationship to the world, but as a contingent, and constantly evolving set of conventions established out of the relationship between a particular work and its audience.

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escaping from Mercy Hospital). Complete with movie posters exhibited during load

screens (Figure 5-2), much of Left 4 Dead’s aesthetic reinforces the game’s connection

to grindhouse films. The game even contains an adjustable “film grain” filter55 and the

music, which was composed to directly shape the player’s experience of the game,

borrows from classic horror tropes.

The remediation of these filmic devices is not only cosmetic, but they are

incorporated as important elements in the game’s mechanics. Various leitmotifs or

sound cues can be heard to warn players when a specific infected approaches (like

Jaws’ or Jason’s presence is signified by specific musical bars) and a screeching

bassline can be heard when a horde of zombies is coming, its volume level adjusted in

proportion to the intensity of the attack. Left 4 Dead’s music is not uniform throughout

the game, but modulated on the basis of the in-game action so that the player can

interpret the music and adjust their strategy accordingly.

While the music, posters, and lighting each contributes to the filmic experience,

what Valve self-consciously avoids is the common videogame convention of interrupting

the game with cinematic cut-scenes as a way of pushing the narrative forward at key

points. The game selectively adapts those aspects of film that can be put in the greatest

service of a videogame aesthetic. While the Hollywood zombie, as Shaviro argued, may

be without origin or referent, the Left 4 Dead series has taken this simulacrum as its

point of departure. The setting of the first series also further reinforces this connection to

55 The game itself will adjust the film grain at various points in the game, making it appear more crackly during more tense or overwhelming moments in the game, but the user can also manually adjust the filter. Dialing down some of the post-processing effects such as the film grain, vignetting (an effect often seen in cheap film cameras where darkness bleeds from the edge of the screen), localized contrast, color correction, gore and weather (e.g. rain levels can be adjusted) may make for a smoother, if less cinematic, gameplay.

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film history as it is set in Pennsylvania, which may perhaps be an indirect reference to

George Romero, longtime native of Pittsburgh who filmed many of his films around that area using local actors. Unlike the second game in the series that attempts to create region-specific content, the environment in the first game is purposely generic. It signifies an otherwise unremarkable American landscape, but one which also resonates with a specific cinematic history.

The basic plotline of Left 4 Dead is fairly straightforward—the game is set shortly after the outbreak of Green Flu. There is minimal explanation of the circumstances related to the outbreak or the origins of the four characters and how they came together.

Working with the standard tropes of the zombie genre, the unlikely group of survivors represents a mix of classes, races, genders, and backgrounds. The first set of characters are comprised of a student, a biker, white collar worker, and Vietnam vet. In the second, we the team is made up of a journalist, an auto-mechanic, a grifter, and an overweight high-school athletic coach. In both, the same demographic proportions apply as there is one female, two adult men, and a more elderly, patriarchal male. The characters (and players) are simply placed in medias res and must continually move in order to survive.56

An astute player of the first Left 4 Dead game might surmise (or a skeptical one who cannot understand how so much blood, bile, entrails, and vomit could be spilled without the survivors ever becoming infected themselves) is that these eight survivors

56 Two different sets of characters are featured in the first and second games of the series. In a campaign titled “The Passing,” the two teams encounter each other. “The Passing” was not included in the original release of the games, but was added to the series as downloadable content (DLC) for the owners of either the first or second game (a growing convention of digital distribution in videogames is the serialized release of content).

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are immune to the mutagenic effects of the disease, but carriers of Green Flu. As the

central goal of the game is to move from one safehouse to another, the dark implication

is that the survivors themselves have been spreading disease everywhere they travel.

This scenario seems particularly likely since we learn in a Left 4 Dead comic that

transmission of the disease is primarily airborne.57 The airborne nature of the disease

explains why the rescue attempts that close each campaign never end in success. Each

attempt by helicopter, boat, plane, and, finally, military transport, ends in failure.

The decision to make the survivors carriers of the zombifying disease worked with

the logic of the game as we can infer that it is the characters themselves, as opposed to

some contrived external narrative pulsion, which drive the game’s multitude of

repetitions. The characters are thus narratively configured as the engine of their own

serial fatalism. Moreover, their status as carriers makes them a doubled bringer of

death. Since they produce a miasma of disease wherever they travel, they are the

cause of the infection as well as the slayers of the already-infected. At the same time,

their immunity implies that they may offer hope for a more literal cure, the immune

carrier standing as humanity’s last hope for survival. Since Romero, one of the common

didactic messages expressed in the social commentary of zombie films is that there is

no difference between humans and zombies. “They’re just us, that’s all,” Peter softly

explains in Dawn of the Dead. As the zombie in the Dead series evolves, the

revolutionary potential of the zombie and its capacity for agency is made more and

more clear. Although this message is not as foregrounded in Left 4 Dead as it is in other

57 The Left 4 Dead comic was released shortly after Left 4 Dead 2. It was serially distributed in four sections as a lead-up to the cross-over campaign “The Passing,” that was made available as DLC for both games in the series. The story was written by Valve’s game writers and illustrated by Mike Oeming.

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zombie media, at the heart of this serial engine is the fact that the only distinction between survivors (who are simply another class of infected) and the zombies they battle, is that they do not acknowledge that they are already zombies—and zombies with as ruthless a capacity for violence as the mobs they fight off.

There are other ways in which the game subtly starts to break down the false binary between zombie and human. In his essay on Left 4 Dead, Scott Reed emphasizes how upon a player’s death, if she is playing with other teammates who are not yet dead or incapacitated, the game announces, “You are Dead. You will be rescued soon” (Figure 5-3). Unlike past video game series such as Resident Evil, which featured a kill screen that announced in bloody hand-writing “You are Dead,” this finality has been translated into seriality. Breaking the conventions of realism in order to create a more fluid form of play by allowing a player’s character to be revived, the player’s virtual death has itself become zombified, further breaking down the binary between living, dead, and undead. While multiple lives is a common convention of many videogames, the survivors in Left 4 Dead are distinctly framed as yet another species of undead, not much different from those special infected “bosses” within the game.

Left 4 Dead 2

When the second installment of the game relocates to the southern US, its cultural and geographical specificity is highlighted. This distinguishes it from the first game whose frame of reference was a filmic, rather than regional landscape. The distinctive horror music from the first series is rewritten with instruments and rhythms borrowed from regional styles like bluegrass, ragtime, and jazz. The survivors do not travel through suburbs, but begin in Savannah, Georgia, where they steal a stock car from the mall before navigating the bayou, battling a unique type of infected called “Mud Men”

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who swim and are camouflaged by the muddy water. After travelling through the swamps, they end up on a plantation, fighting their way through the slaves’ quarters before taking a stand inside an antebellum mansion. In the campaign “Hard Rain,” a hurricane hits forcing the survivors to once again wade through water and take shelter in a crumbling sugar mill before the game culminates with “The Parish,” set in New

Orleans.

As a result of Valve’s decision to set the game in the southern U.S., and particularly the concluding campaign in New Orleans, complete with military jets flying overhead highway 10 (Figure 5-4), it is impossible to ignore the uncanny and often chilling resonance the game has with the disaster resulting from Hurricane Katrina in

2005. There is the constant presence of warnings, checklists and procedures from the

Civil Emergency and Defense Agency (CEDA), an organization that proves to be completely inept at controlling the outbreak. CEDA’s action sadly echo the incompetence exhibited by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during the actual 2005 disaster that left thousands of residents, particularly those in the

Ninth Ward, literally for dead. Orlando Patterson’s famously used the term “social death” to describe the legal and cultural position of slaves and, sadly, the concept still carries some weight with respect to the official treatment given to many of the once-vibrant communities struck by the hurricane. The status of survivors as “carriers,” only further inscribes their rejection from what remains of human society. With graffiti announcing

“death to all carriers” on the wall, the survivors, surrounded by nothing but death, are simultaneously living in a state of social death. At the end of the second game, the survivors arrive in the center of a crumbling New Orleans. Houses are boarded up,

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zombies walk the streets, and jets fly overhead as the US military bombs the city as a

final solution to the infected. The survivors, much like the victims of Katrina, have also

been left for dead (Figure 5-5, 5-6). At a loss for options, the survivors find a radio on

the body of a soldier’s corpse and make a last ditch request for evacuation. The game

concludes with their being “saved” and flown to a shelter, but as it is made clear that the

military suspects them of being carriers, the players’ victory at the end of the campaign

is likely a Pyrrhic one.58 Having survived countless of attacks of living dead, it is their

rejection from the remaining collective of uninfected humans that will prove to be more

dangerous.

AI Director

While the zombies (as well as the survivors) are multi-racial, Left 4 Dead 2’s

references to Hurricane Katrina, which hit most harshly disenfranchised African-

American communities, evokes the class and racial contexts of the Haitian voodoo

zombie.59 The survivors explore the sugar mill belonging to the Ducatel Sugar Company

and walk through tall sugar cane fields in which zombies hide, waiting to attack. The

mise-en-scène and the francophone company name immediately places the level within

the cultural context of Haiti and HASCO (Haitian American Sugar Company), once

believed to have zombified its many indentured laborers in order to put them to work in

the fields and factory (as seen in White Zombie with the voodoo master Murder

Legendre [Bela Legosi] who runs the profitable sugar mill using zombie laborers). The

58 In a comic that was released prior to the release of additional DLC for the first and second games, more details on the situation are provided. Readers learn with certainty that immune carriers spread the disease to the uninfected and that the military’s policy on carriers is similar to their policy on dealing with the infected zombies.

59 Another recent zombie videogame which produced a huge controversy for its racially-charged setting was Capcom’s Resident Evil 5, set in Africa.

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way in which the game returns to this older model of the zombie not only takes place via the politicized imagery in the narrative, but through the game’s mechanics and software, specifically Valve’s vanguard technology, AI Director. AI Director was first used in a limited way in Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but Left 4 Dead was the first game to fully incorporate this feature into the gameplay. Once again making reference to the zombie’s cinematic roots and the players’ role as actors in the game, the “Director” is a complex set of parallel artificial intelligences (AI) which control pacing, dialogue, resources, music, and, most importantly, zombie swarms, adjusting gameplay in real time, based on the in-game performance of players, to create a balanced, yet dramatic rhythm to the progress of the campaign. Valve has coined this technique a “procedural narrative,” as the player can never fully anticipate how and when the zombies will attack; a new, unpredictable experience is serially generated with each playthrough. If we think about the effects of AI Director and its position within the gameworld of Left 4

Dead, we can think of the software as a kind of digital Bela Legosi (the witch doctor in

White Zombie), that puppet master behind the curtain who steers the fate of the players.

The better the players perform, demonstrating their autonomy and agency within the system, the more “angry” the Director becomes, throwing up greater obstacles to immobilize them. With the knowledge that our avatars are framed as carriers of infection, this analogy between the Director and voodoo zombie master becomes more apt: in multiple ways, the player is already a kind of zombie. The survivors are embedded zombie agent spreading the condition as they move. Their ability to be continually “revived,” both through their many in-game resurrections as well as every time a player loads the game to play serializes their deaths and generates more

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infected. Through these means the survivors amass ever-increasing armies of undead.

At the discretion of a mysterious “Director,” their actions and responses become as programmatic as those of the horde. After a survivor named “Coach” guffaws at the uselessness of CEDA’s guidelines, Ellis, a young southern auto-mechanic replies: “Kill all sons of bitches, that's my official instructions.” This comment is even more true than the opening initially reveals. The zombified survivors behave with the same single- mindedness that characterizes the creatures they fight.

Serial Killers

As is now common of many online games, Left 4 Dead makes use of a complex set of gameplay analytics. Networking gaming is not a new phenomenon. From its humble beginnings in the multi-user dungeons (MUDs) of the late seventies to the first- person death matches of Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) in the nineties, networked play has long been an integral part of computer gaming. More recently these types of network games have also proliferated on videogame consoles through the release

Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade (2004), Nintendo’s Virtual Console (2006), and Sony’s

PlayStation Store (2006) which feature virtual hubs, public score boards, and community achievements. Prior to this renaissance, home videogame consoles made by companies like Atari, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony kept most players in a state of serialized isolation. Returning to the example of Super Mario Bros., even though thousands of players have jumped over goombas and green pipes, these activities within the gameworld have historically remained distinct from other gameworlds constituted by other players. Upon death or reset, the history of these player performances is effaced and the Sisyphean task of rescuing the princess begins anew.

Even the concept of multiple lives typically built into these games reflects this invisible

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mass repetition. While our individual experience of playing games may be a unique and

irreducible assemblage of complex technological, conceptual, haptic, and narrative

phenomena, we unconsciously participate in a vast network of composite actions that

make up the aggregate histories of digital environments. But what happens when the

“reset” button is removed? When all these actions are recorded and aggregated into

sets of gameplay analytics?

Networked games like Left 4 Dead, a direct descendent of the rich tradition of

nineties PC gaming, critically engage foundational serial structures that define

videogames. In the same way Left 4 Dead forces players to have to work together as a

team, players are further bound by playing directly with serial mechanics. Their in-game

actions leave traces and trails in the larger social field of the game, as their data is

tracked, recorded, aggregated, and exhibited. For example, at the completion of a

campaign in Left 4 Dead a long series of “credits” roll (in keeping with the film

aesthetic), except that in place of a the cast and crew, the credits are comprised of a

highly detailed ranking system that exhibits each of the four players’ accomplishments

during the game (Figure 5-7).60 Players are positioned according to statistics like the

numbers of headshots, the total number of infected killed, the amount of damage done

by each player to the special infected “bosses,” and the number of health packs used.

The credits wryly conclude with a tallying of the number of zombies “killed during the

making of the film,” playing on the common disclaimer in film closing credits that no

harm was done to any featured animals. (Figure 5-8).

60 This form of ranking does not happen in a “versus” match, perhaps because the winning team necessarily ranks the players’ performance. Since everybody succeeds in the collaborative campaigns, displaying the credits and scores still leaves room for ranking and distinction among the players.

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The credits at the end of the campaign are the first of a series of gameplay

analytics made available to the player. While this is hardly a new phenomenon (scoring

systems are a fundamental feature of the earliest games), the level of complexity

combined with the seriality of the scoring system, result in a dramatically transformed

relationship to gameplay. For example, certain sets of player data like total time played

are not localized to individual games, but are displayed prominently on all player

accounts. Even if a player wished to “erase” a bad performance this is not possible

without opening a new account and starting a new online identity. Instead, high and low

scores, if not erased, are deemphasized by the sheer amount aggregate data that

flattens not just one but all player histories. The statistical data thus leaves a permanent

trace that recalls Chun’s concept of the “undead of information.”61

To understand the significance of these analytics it is useful to review the history

of scoring in videogames. Initially, arcade games scored player performance according

to two criteria: time and points. Traditionally, emphasis was placed on amassing the

highest number of points. This was the means by which a player could simultaneously

verify the effects of their actions in-game and create a semi-permanent trace of her or

his activity in the arcade. Often to achieve and register these scores was augmented by

some monetary commitment (“insert another quarter to play again”). With the

development of platform games, in which the challenge faced by the player was usually

to navigate the space as quickly as possible, time became a variable frequently

measured and ranked. Scoring was a means of fostering sociality and competition

amongst gaming communities, guiding players through the completion of certain

61 A handful of games such as Team Fortress 2 allow you to reset your statistics, but this is not the case with the Left 4 Dead series.

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challenges, and making money. With the development of home consoles during the eighties, in some ways scores were rendered vestigial. In Super Mario Bros., for example, there is a score that tracks the number of points amassed, but this served no in-game function (and the high scores were not even recorded on the cartridge).

As game technology advanced, there was a renewed interest in the potential of scores and their ability to track player performance. The more granular the scoring mechanism, the more one could gameplay and game procedures in a given game. In

1997, the “head shot” was born almost simultaneously in GoldenEye 007 for the

Nintendo 64 and Team Fortress, a popular Quake mod (Totilo).62 Following this ability to differentiate between different body wounds, games introduced more complex ways of ranking and scoring by monitoring player position, in-game activities, and multi-player interactions through more granular sets of data. No longer was it simply the number of kills that counted or total health, but also the accuracy, pacing, and method of execution. As FPSs evolved, the ways of tabulating scores continued to develop. With the development of online gaming, gameplay analytics now occupy an incredibly

62 Alexander Galloway argues that the first-person perspective of these games is influenced by the first- person subjective camera (in which subject and camera are fused) and point-of-view (POV) shots that roughly align camera with character (42-69). If this is indeed the case, it is fascinating to note that it is in the era of head shots, first-person shooters, and digital culture that George Romero chose to produce Diary of the Dead (2007), a reboot of Night of the Living Dead told entirely from the perspective of a diegetic camera. The use of a diegetic camera follows the revival of this technique in recent horror films (The Zombie Diaries [2006], Paranormal Activity [2007], and Cloverfield [2008]) after the release of Blair Witch Project (1999), but is rooted in a much longer legacy that goes as far back to Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947). In Diary of the Dead, a group of film students attempt to survive the zombie attacks while filming their experience for an uncertain posterity. The film not only depicts the terror of attempting to understand the mysterious events taking place, but also the varying degrees of discomfort exhibited by the characters at filming the experience as it unfolds. Viral media and the viral zombie are conflated in Diary of the Dead and while it is the “head shot” that is now associated with YouTube’s viral videos that is more frequently cited in the film, one cannot ignore the connection to the scopic regime of contemporary gaming culture. The tagline of the film “shoot the dead” conflates the violence of “headshotting” zombies (the concept of the head shot being historically more rooted in the advancement first-person shooters rather than actual marksmanship) with the standard “head shot” in film and photography. As Susan Sontag describes in On Photography, the camera is also a potential form of violence, which she describes as a “soft murder” [15]).

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important role in governing player behavior. For example, generating “heatmaps” which graphically visualize the activity of players by overlaying server data (like location of deaths) on top of game environments (usually plan views of levels) is a popular way of analyzing player actions in games like Counterstrike and Halo. By embellishing an actual map of the game-space with data collected within the level, players can easily identify dangerous choke points, clever hiding places, and the safest paths to travel given a particular map and a particular player community. With respect to a player’s individual performance, her data is taken and compared with not just that of the other individuals she plays against, but with the community of players local to that server.

The amount of player data that it is now possible to collect in online gaming environments is immense. As Lev Manovich declares, “[w]e have moved from the stage of ‘New Media’ to the stage of ‘More Media.” While many game companies undertake data collection, Valve has made an effort to distribute this information to not only business managers and software developers, but also their player. Manovich’s solution to the problem of our contemporary information glut is what he calls “cultural analytics,” this is the process of developing “techniques to analyze and visualize the patterns in movies, cartoons, motion graphics, photography, video games, web sites, design, architecture, and other types of visual media.” While Manovich’s research is geared towards importing these techniques into the context of the humanities, this type of data mining and visualization is already being done (and used) by large populations through the gameplay analytics provided on sites like Steam, or companies that produce large multiplayer games like Bungie and Blizzard. The open circulation of this information does not simply add to the vast amount of information available online, but it directly

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impacts player behavior in terms of how the community interacts and plays with each other. The data is not neutral, but produces critical effects.

Over Achievers

The recent development of “achievements” underscores this point. Achievements have come to function as a kind of meta-game. Once the game is completed, gamers can return to undertake more challenges. For example, in Grand Theft Auto one can acquire the achievement of having killed one thousand pigeons or walking one thousand miles.

In Left 4 Dead, some of the achievements are basic—simply markers that one has completed campaigns or survived a campaign without using a health pack—the level of difficulty (or absurdity) of an achievement can often be judged by the percentage of players who received the achievements. Some achievements require painstaking attention to levels of minutiae that only the most committed gamer would have any interest in pursuing, such as “Kill a Special Infected with an Exploding Barrel” and “As a

Special Infected incap [incapacitate] someone who is trying to sacrifice themselves.”

Many of the achievements are attained passively, simply by playing and experimenting with the game, but the tallying of achievements can encourage players to begin actively pursuing more obscure tasks in the gameworld, in the expectation that this will be rewarded. Thus, in the process of playing a game, thousands of unconscious activities the player makes during a session are categorized and assessed, in some respects apart from the relevance of those activities to larger stated goals of the game. When the credits roll at the end of Left 4 Dead, the player can sit back and look in satisfaction (or dismay) at her accomplishments. This information is then funneled into the player’s overall statistics, which are publically available to anyone online who wishes to access the data (perhaps to vet a potential teammate or contrast a player’s statistics with one’s

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own). These statistics tell you how many hours, how many games, and how many zombies a player has killed (and many more minute details as well as the aggregate totals of all players).

Because the statistics at the end of the campaign are modeled as film credits, the player is not only further framed as the “actor” making a movie, but she is also implicitly aligned with the army of invisible workers whose traces are typically marked only at the end of a movie. This conflation of play with labor is not too far removed from Valve’s business model. If the storyline and gameplay of the videogame enforces the notion that the player are being controlled by the witch doctor-like AI director who harnesses their labor to generate even more zombies, this zombie logic also applies to the way in which each player’s unconscious labor is harvested as an instrumental element in the videogame’s development cycle.

In an essay on what he terms the e-zombie, Brendan Riley examines the way in which the zombie trope functions in online environments. Beginning with zombie hard drives that hackers use in order to harness armies of zombie computers for Denial of

Service attacks (in which the hacker figures as a kind of witch doctor controlling a zombie army), he extends the logic of the Haitian zombie. Riley argues that “Digital zombification refers to the experience of “seeing” one's digital self, perhaps a handle and avatar cultivated in cyberspace, perhaps an incarnation of one's real-life identity, acting of its own accord or at the behest of someone else, a digital bocor.” While the most egregious form of losing control of an online identity is identity theft, Riley suggests that it happens everyday when someone posts a photo on Facebook or makes a comment about someone else on Twitter. But the most important way that he notes

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digital zombification occurs is through the zombification of labor that defines the Web

2.0 business strategy. Riley describes the way businesses “generate vast revenues based on the hordes of users” who make “their creative work available without pay.” In the case of Facebook and Twitter for example, users themselves supply the vast majority of the content. In the same way the Haitian zombie was a way of expressing anxieties over slave labor, Riley sees this profit model built around the unpaid labor of users as a kind of digital zombie.

Valve has a long history of relying on its audience as a means of producing content. This is accomplished through two central business tactics: the easy availability of authoring tools and Steam. Although Left 4 Dead is distributed on multiple hardware platforms (e.g. X-Box 360 and Mac), it was originally designed for PC and circulated via

Steam, an online distribution platform that has come to be one of the most popular and centralized hubs for PC gamers.63 While Steam distributes a huge number of games from thousands of game companies, it was originally designed (and is owned by) Valve.

Valve’s own games are specifically designed to take advantage of the benefits of digital distribution. The company is able to release patches and new campaigns as downloadable content. Both production and play are serialized. It is also with via Steam that the company can collect detailed information about player behavior, essentially appropriating a player’s labor and funneling it into the production circuit. As we will see in the concluding chapter, in games like Love and Minecraft, this development model of

63 While Valve is generous about releasing software and player data to users, some key information that it does withhold includes its sales figures. Valve is estimated to have control over 70% of the online distribution market (Graft 2009).

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serial fan labor has the capacity to become even more enmeshed with, and central to,

the production process.

Apart from the creation of a giant online distribution network, Valve has followed in

the tradition of PC gaming by diligently releasing sophisticated sets of authoring tools

and developer kits sidelong the game itself in order to make the game accessible to

“modding” communities. A mod is a game which has been “modified” in order to make

different versions, sometimes completely different games, out of original game engines.

As Alexander Galloway has observed, “the industry’s magnanimity has worked to its

advantage” (113) and much of Valve’s success is based on modding.64 With respect to

Left 4 Dead, many mods, cheats, and reconfigurations of Left 4 Dead have been

produced and distributed by fans, one notable one being the “Romero mod” in which the

infected do not run, but walk. They can only be killed through a headshot.

Valve encourages users to work with their code and develop original creations,

sometimes assimilating the projects and even hiring those independent developers who

produce outstanding work. There are success stories such as the students at DigiPen

who designed an early version of Portal and Jess Cliffe and Minh Le, creators of the first

Counter-Strike, who went to work for Valve after modding these games as independent

projects. Yet, apart from this there are vast armies of unpaid laborers, the zombie

players whose work is in evidence in the end credits of the campaign.

64 Valve’s open-sourced its game engine for the single-player Half-Life and it was modded to have multiplayer capabilities by a fan who developed the game Counter Strike. Valve eventually acquired Counter-Strike, hired its original developer and then distributed the game, turning it into the most popular online game in the world. Despite its age, it is still actively played by a dedicated community of fans. Multiple versions of Counter Strike have been released, but from this game another mod was produced for a game called Team Fortress which added different classes which could be played during multiplayer combat. Team Fortress and the currently popular updated version Team Fortress 2 are dedicated to player vs. player combat and have a unique visual aesthetic reminiscent of Pixar’s animations combined with different classes of characters who hold different strengths and abilities.

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The zombie, as Steven Shaviro argues, is deeply tied to function of capitalism:

“The life-in-death of the zombie is a nearly perfect allegory for the inner logic of capitalism, whether this be taken in the sense of the exploitation of living labor by dead labor, the deathlike regimentation of factories and other social spaces, or the artificial, externally driven stimulation of consumers.” In the case of Valve, however, it has made many of us willing zombies. Releasing developer data to the modding community, for example, is a way of guaranteeing long-term returns as there is always a possibility an individual will independently make an innovation that Valve can channel back into its own game development. The massive amounts of statistical data produced from the players’ activity also have a crucial role in helping design teams to make decisions about future games. Valve’s ultimate aim, like any other large gaming company, is to make a profit, but their policy long-term, rather than short term profit goals has created a fan base willing to donate their labor. Occasionally, fan labor is rewarded. Valve has responded to bottom-up innovations by hiring outstanding fan developers and recently, it has started issuing royalties (some modders receiving five-figure payments) for item- mods that can be purchased online for Team Fortress 2 (Graft 2010). These attempts to remunerate fan labor ultimately redirect the energies put into the game back into the flow of capital.

It is in this respect that Left 4 Dead ties together the undead labor of the player as depicted in the gameworld with the larger economic and technological conditions that inform the production of the game. The AI Director serves as a confirmation of

Alexander Galloway’s theory that games are “allegories of control,” (Gaming, 85-106) yet this mechanism of control has expanded as a means to interpellate players as

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workers in a much larger system of economic production. In an article titled “Games without Play,” David Golumbia uses Derrida’s concept of jeu in order to trouble the notion that the vast majority of mainstream games offer actual play (as opposed to repetitive tasks such as grinding, item collection, and efficient twitch response). He argues that “it seems no accident that one main form of what seems to be

‘entertainment’ in many ways simply replicates and simulates the precise world of employment and movements of capital that do, in fact, define much of the world in which we engage” (197). While Golumbia’s observation is accurate, he only looks to the way in which games simulate labor. A crucial supplement to his argument is the fact that these games are no longer simply training grounds for labor, but have the gamespace has itself become a factory. Factories in which these simulations of labor now function as actual labor via networked gameplay analytics. These game factories recall White

Zombie’s sugar mill in which the unpaid zombie laborers obediently push the milling wheel around endless circles, transfixed on the unrelenting task of grinding.

We Have Always Been Zombies

Golumbia’s essay is particularly bleak owing to the fact that it restricts its analysis to only the most popular, mass-market games which he concludes (unsurprisingly) function to reinforce the most excessive forms of capitalism and imperialism. Yet what is even more bleak is precisely that so many individuals willingly return and find pleasure in these forms of mechanical repetition. Valve has created conditions in which players are in the transformation of their leisure time into labor and vigorously pursue this activity. Golumbia’s conclusions recall the outcome of the romantic zombie parody

Shaun of the Dead (2001). At the beginning of the film, the two protagonists, Shaun

(Simon Pegg) and Ed (Nick Park) are depicted in a zombie-like state playing

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videogames. At the conclusion of the film – in the wake of a zombie holocaust – they are depicted once again playing videogames. The premise of the film begins with Shaun as a contemporary version of Sartre’s serial man and it concludes with the only significant difference being that rather than reject the mundane conditions of his life, he finds redemption through acknowledgement of the pleasure and meaning to be had in a zombie lifestyle. Tellingly, videogames are the vehicle through which the film expresses this idea.

While the undead status of player labor may be a significant force in the games industry, my subsequent chapter will argue that there are alternatives. Moving away from this compulsive death drive, I turn to a discussion of love. I will continue to engage the problem of the relationship between labor and leisure, work and play, while looking at experimental practices which confront this idea of undead player-labor and attempt to unsettle the aesthetic and economic standards that have been rigidly imposed by the mainstream gaming industry.

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FIGURES

Figure 5-1. The writing on the wall in Left 4 Dead 2

Figure 5-2. The movie poster doubles as load screen and also displays the players starring in the game

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Figure 5-3. Serial death in Left 4 Dead 2

Figure 5-4. Jets flying across the highways of New Orleans in Left 4 Dead 2

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Figure 5-5. The devastated residential homes of New Orleans

Figure 5-6. Zombies falling out of buildings, overtaking New Orleans

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Figure 5-7. The "credits" roll at the end of the game

Figure 5-8. Gameplay stats are recorded and made part of a player's permanent record

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CHAPTER 6 STATE OF PLAY: PROCEDURAL LOVE AND POLITICAL GAMES

As described in the previous chapter, the logic of Hollywood as well as the logic of capital looms large over video game development. Mainstream industries are propelled by the desire for immersive narrative and filmic realism: better graphics, better physics engines, and better artificial intelligence—a seductive version of late capitalism in which the “upgrade path” (Harpold 2008) short circuits conceptual and procedural alternatives to its endless, ahistorical march. (This is the same temporality Jameson describes as a series of “pure and unrelated presents in time” [Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,

27]). Yet the ubiquity of this neoliberal framework has not entirely eliminated the existence of alternative and experimental practices within videogames. Meta-games, art game, electronic poetry, countergames, overgames, endgames, and notgames are a few examples of emerging genres which provide some friction and resistance to this drive. The increased power of home computers and availability of open source game engines and network toolsets has re-catalyzed an explosion of smaller scale projects such as user-generated content and modding, networked webgames, casual games, and mobile apps. While Left 4 Dead could be seen as the product of once autonomous energies expended by independent developers whose work has been monetized and subsumed within the logic of capital, this chapter will examine how the serial production afforded by networked environments still leaves room for alternative approaches.

Focusing primarily on Eskil Steenberg’s videogame Love (2009-present), I will examine a new genre of procedurally-generated virtual worlds and the way in which emergent mechanics that govern these games allow for spontaneous assemblages of designer and players. I argue that being in Love produces a form of what political love

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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s understand as political love. Moreover, Steenberg’s utopian experiment opens up a horizon of possibility surrounding not only the possible futures of games, but their lost past. Love helps imagine how an alternative history of games in which the game development could have taken a radically different route had it not been so tightly locked into a specific upgrade path defined by the demands of the marketplace.

Love creates not only the conditions for a gameplay that is emergent (a fashionable concept in the current game industry), but a form of political emergence as well. Although Love and other procedural games like it such as Dwarf Fortress and

Minecraft may not be the agitprop of other more politicized games, they offer a direct line of flight from current aesthetic models offered in the mainstream gaming industry.

This is made possible by a serial mode of production, distribution, and play.

Love signals a transition from massively-multiplayer online games to massively- multiproducer online games. Play is production. Not only is the kind of play these procedurally generated worlds offer a simulation of labor (terraforming, mining, farming, settlement building, etc.), but it is actual labor, freely offered by the players out of commitment to the project. It is common to see computer programmers and game designers playing in their spare time, an outcome of the nineties dotcom boom and indicative of this New Economy’s continuing erosion of the boundary between labor and leisure. These activities which conflate work and play are also supported by a vigorous forum culture and communication network in which players can participate to assist with the development of the game. The result of these games is the establishment of a kind of spontaneous city-state of play, with the main programmer serving as leader over a

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volunteer community of players. While games such as Love are auteurist in the sense that there is a single designer organizing the game, they are also collectivist in that the conditions through which these games are made possible are the result of the formation of a multitude: a collective commons willing to exchange its real labor in return for virtual play. The serial and procedural systems that characterize the production and play of

Love form, borrowing from Tom Moylan, a generative “critical utopia”—Steenberg creates a virtual environment in which the player is invited to not only imagine alternative possibilities of play, but also an alternative history of games.

Making Love

Eskil Steenberg debuted his idea for a massively-multiplayer online (MMO) world at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2009. He imagined a world in which the environment was procedurally generated and, most importantly, persistent (Figure 6-1).

Though a cornerstone of artificial intelligence research involves evolutionary algorithms like Conway’s The Game of Life, procedurally generated mechanics are an increasing trend in videogames. Typically, a procedural game begins with a set of very simple processes which, when propagated, give rise to complex and unexpected phenomenon.

Emergence is a key concept for the history of artificial intelligence, the evolution of complex thinking and natural language, and the spontaneous proliferation of life on this planet. In order to design Love, Steenberg coded a set of physical and social algorithms ranging from wind, tides, the turn of the earth and geological events to self-organizing communities of artificial intelligences. Love models natural phenomena in a surprisingly robust way. Human players are dropped into a kind of computational wilderness where subtle combinations of simple algorithms generate surprising results (Figure 6-2).

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In Unit Operations (2006) Ian Bogost offers an approach to videogame criticism that models itself on these emergent effects or what he terms “unit operations.” Bogost defines unit operations as "modes of meaning making that privilege discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems"(3). What he terms unit operations could just as easily be called serial operations in that core elements of this model are organized around repetition, modularity, simultaneity, and succession.

Bogost writes "[t]he Internet, the brain, human genetics, and social fads are examples of complex, unit-driven networks"(8). Bogost attempts to take this model based on object- oriented programming and certain kinds of videogame structures, to develop a unit operational approach to videogame criticism. This move from the technical to the critical is a gesture echoed in Love. Out of the interaction of these independent processes the game is able to produce emergent mechanics that then open up possibilities for emergent gameplay with respect to how players are able to encounter and navigate these environments.

Love’s gameplay is a product of the entanglement of these algorithms with the actions of human players. Placed within a hostile, unpredictable landscape, players must work together to maintain habitats. The game was designed to avoid the logic of contemporary MMOs which, according to Steenberg, are “not actually trying to be fun.

They're trying to be addictive" (Alexander). The persistent, yet procedurally-generated landscape enables collaboration and communication among players, inviting them to become stewards as opposed to just users of the land. A player exploring the wilderness may come upon a skeletal husk of some ancient human architecture, mutated until nearly unrecognizable via the geological algorithms that that run day and

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night. And if a battle does take place, for example, the ground might remain mottled with

holes from weapon-fire making the land permanently difficult to traverse and

demonstrating that there are long-term consequences to violent destruction. The game

was designed to avoid some of the more egregious infelicities of contemporary MMOs

which, according to Steenberg, are “not actually trying to be fun. They're trying to be

addictive" (Alexander).65

Steenberg’s Love stands in relief to traditional MMOs. Most MMOs are built

around two basic strategies of play: item collection and leveling up your characters.

Even social alliances are in the service of this deeply individualist program and social

status via virtual commodities. When a player “escapes” to World of Warcraft, she is

really just seeing a mirror of neoliberalism’s excesses placed in a fantasy setting. As

David Golumbia observes, games such as World of Warcraft “simulate our own relation

to capital and to the people who must be exploited and used up for capital to do its

work” (194).

Love, by contrast, is focused around collective dynamics and the labor is modeled

on a collective politics. The player engages in settlement building by piecing together in-

game modules reminiscent of the functions found in programming languages. Players

meet with Steenberg on IRC and critique the game via collective brainstorming on the

forums. Suggestions and bug reports are filed constantly with the hope of driving further

developments. In Love there is no “leveling up” and accomplishments are shared. While

65 For example, Blizzard periodically releases expansions to World of Warcraft (three to date) requiring the player to purchase not only the continued monthly subscription, but the new content. Moreover, World of Warcraft is also notorious for the way in which it designs gameplay around item collection and character customization so much so that an entire real-world informal economy of goldfarming circulates around it and other similarly-designed games. For a discussion of the real-world economics of goldfarming in World of Warcraft in which third-world workers, mostly in China, are put to work “playing” the game see Dyer-Witherford and De Peuter (123–151).

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there are no “quests” or pre-generated stories in Love, in-game events such as spontaneous floods, fires, or attacks force players to rally together to defend, build, and preserve their settlements. Because the world is persistent, what happens in the game cannot be undone.

Aside from being an impressive technical accomplishment, the discrete operations of Love’s algorithms reject the usual models of incentives and acquisition. Depending on a player’s skill, some games may require a heroic number of failed attempts in order to reach a goal and others, such as early arcade games or puzzle games like Tetris, are endurance runs that will inevitably end with a loss. Yet most games typically keep some form of score as a means of documenting achievement. Love is also an unwinnable game. In this respect, it follows the growing number of political and experimental games. The game is not built around the idea of success through victory, conquest, or scoring.

By creating unwinnable conditions and a merciless virtual environment of geological transformation, Love builds a gameplay based on failure and storytelling.

Pleasure arises from being able to collectively struggle to build a settlement and then, through neglect or disaster, watch the settlement collapse. Nothing is permanent as the inhospitable wilderness of the digital landscape will always write over the player’s fleeting successes. The players, however, have the satisfaction of taking away unique anecdotes surrounding their experiences of attempting to survive for as long as possible. In this respect, Love is a serial and generative storytelling machine.

Tools of the Trade

One of the most significant facets of Love is that Steenberg not only designed the game, but he also developed the tools required to program the game, including a 3D

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modeling platform, 2D texturing tool, an integrated real-time file system, and a server-

side scripting tool in order to produce and maintain Love (Figure 6-3). His software does

not use the traditional metaphors and icons that we have come to take for granted in the

world of the desktop computer.66 While larger game companies are invested in software

development, it is rare to see this type of investment amongst independent designers. It

is more common for solo-developers to work with the authoring tools that are already

available. Love, however, began with a rejection of not only industry-led aesthetics and

gameplay, but also its very processes and modes of production. Steenberg has

attempted to make an experimental practice out of production software. His interest in

developing an alternative to the games industry has moved one layer deeper from

gameplay to development tools.

This is one way in which Steenberg moves beyond those games whose content is

more explicitly political, artistic, or experimental (e.g. Super Mario Clouds, Velvet Strike,

September 12, Darfur is Dying Every Day the Same Dream). In Gaming: Essays on

Algorithmic Culture (2006), Alexander Galloway astutely notes how “there exists a

symbiotic relationship between mod artists and the industry in a way not seen in

previous avant-garde movements. In fact, an overview of artist-made game mods reads

like a laundry list of commercial game engines” (113). These small-scale tactical efforts

to poke holes in and parody the dominant forms of game production have become one

of the most widely-implemented forms of activist games. This is accomplished by

recognizing that, as with any ironic appropriation or cooptation, there is a certain

amount of complicity with the dominant practice that is the target of appropriation—an

66 For a discussion of the naturalization of the metaphors and visual codes used in the desktop icons of most graphic user interfaces (GUIs), see Harpold (Ex-foliations, 209–244).

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inevitable reinscription of some forms that the appropriative work is trying to critique.

Much like orthodox Marxist arguments about base/superstructure, whether one is shooting peace graffiti in Velvet Strike or fellow players in Counter-Strike, the underlying architecture and procedural rhetoric remains relatively stable despite the political re- alignment.

By creating his own authoring tools, Steenberg’s utopian effort aims for nothing less than a structural paradigm shift in how games are made and played. Instead of relying on tools such as Maya, Flash, or Unity—or modding software like Bungie’s

Forge or Valve’s Source SDK, Steenberg moves away from prevailing economic and technological limitations of trying to create user-friendly software within an established paradigm of the conceit of the upgrade path. Thus, he emphasizes that his work is undertaken with the desire to create tools that are digital-born and which do not rely on the skeumorphic interfaces of analog devices. As he writes on his website, “[m]any editing systems while digital still have their interface roots in tape or film editing, and therefore they do not take full advantage of the possibilities of digital.”

While “alpha” builds of game software typically never leave the studio, Steenberg released early, rudimentary forms of his game to the public. Despite being riddled with bugs and glitches, he offered a monthly subscription for users to begin using the game during these early stages of development. Rather than discourage players, this opportunity inspired many to invest even greater efforts in the game, as they essentially paid a fee to become game testers. Typically, game studios will hire game testers to navigate software with the intention of discovering inconsistencies, broken mechanics, and other overlooked coding errors, but with the increasing popularity of massively

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multiplayer online games, many (but certainly not all) of those activities are covered via the brute force of a given player base. Furthermore, the serial release of patches, achievements, and updates have become a way to not only keep gamers interested in the game, but, following a common pattern in game production, to funnel their play directly into production.

While most industry-made MMOs are already premised around the idea of generating social content and a game like Second-Life by Linden Labs advertises “user generated content,” games such as Love represent a larger move from massively- mulitplayer towards massively-multiproducer online games.

Political Love

In Commonwealth, the third volume of their trilogy, Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri expand on their theory of political love, a subject briefly mentioned in Multitude

(2004). Political love is distinguished from familial love, the kind of love that bolsters bourgeois institutions and morality. Hardt and Negri see love as “a process of the production of the common and the production of subjectivity. This process is not merely a means to producing material goods and other necessities but also in itself an end”

(Commonwealth, 180). Their model of political organization uncannily echoes the formation of virtual game communities. Although they are not stable or fixed, groups will coalesce around certain goals until the movement has exhausted itself and in the case of Love, we can ask why some of its players have decided to participate in the game as the gameplay it offers (at least in a traditional sense) is quite broken. The choice to participate in making Love supports Hardt and Negri’s argument that the community is

“in itself an end”: “ When we engage in the production of subjectivity that is love, we are not merely creating new objects or even new subjects in the world. Instead we are

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producing a new world, a new social life” (Commonwealth, 181). The emphasis is not on what the game is now or even perhaps what it will be, but what it, along with games in general, could be.

Steenberg’s attempt to design a game that departs from the conventions of contemporary gaming is more of a political rallying cry than an invitation to play. Love can be characterized as a product of Hardt and Negri’s love in that it “marks a rupture with what exists and the creation of the new” (Commonwealth, 181). In this respect, the game’s potential does not lie in the actual product that Steenberg offers (although it is both visually and technically impressive), but what is striking about the game is the way in which it figures an alternative future for games, one which looks little like the predominant mode of game production and distribution. Even if the project is flawed in certain respects (which will be discussed later in the essay), there is a sense that

Steenberg’s game is the seed for some alternative possibilities or a radically different future for the computer gaming industry. While previous chapters have demonstrated how the commodified logic of seriality is fueled by dead labor and undead repetition

(whether it is the forever-Young body of Blondie which has not altered since Chic

Young’s death or the infinitely-iterable figure of the shambling zombie), Steenberg’s

Love appears to be driven by a serial mechanism rooted not in death, but love: an embrace of utopian possibility; an eros to seriality’s irrepressible (and irresistible) thanatos.

Serial Sex

If it is difficult to imagine that love in (or for) a procedurally-generated environment might carry an erotic charge, but Steenberg’s press release announcing the drop in the price of Love’s monthly subscription challenges this assumption. Instead of composing

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a traditional press release, Steenberg posted a notice in Craigslist’s “missed connections” forum as an advertising stunt:

Me, attractive game with lots of potential, You, gamer wanting to experience something new but afraid of getting hurt. We met a few months ago on that blog (or was it a message board?) and I could tell my good looks and high maintanance (sic) was intimidating you.

But when I saw you twiddle that joystick, that's all I needed to see to put you in my save file. I know you have been hurt before, but I promise I wont just use you as a gold farmer or ask you for micro payments. So take off that live headset and get with some one who knows the path to your heart is not found through grenade spam or calling you a f*g. You cant buy yourself no happiness with a (sic) achievement points! You need some proper lovin.

The fragmented and agrammatical English is either a result of the fact that Steenberg is a non-native speaker or that there was an attempt to mimic the rhetoric of chat room discourse and sloppy Craigslist postings. The press release also demonstrates a deeply gendered and heteronormative perspective towards sex. Yet the “love” Steenberg offers is one which also explicitly rejects the typically commodified elements of most mainstream games: achievement points, micropayments, and goldfarming. And it implicitly aligns the game’s rejection of capitalism with a rejection of the bourgeois forms of sexuality that serve as capitalism’s foundations by placing it within Stockholm’s

Craigslist section for those seeking casual encounters.

At the conclusion of their chapter on political love in Commonwealth (2009),

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri playfully proclaim: “Let’s have done with worker bees, then, and focus on the singularities and becomings of wasp-orchid love!”

(Commonwealth, 188). They are referring to an anecdote that first appeared in Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s letters and then eventually Thousand Plateaus.

Certain orchids give off the odor of the sex pheromone of female wasps, and their flowers are shaped like the female wasp sex organs, Pollination is thus achieved by “pseudocopulation” as male wasps move from one orchid

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to the next, sinking their genital members into each flower and rubbing off pollen on their bodies in the process. “So wasps fuck flowers!” Felix Guattari exclaims with rather juvenile glee in a letter to Gilles Deleuze. “Wasps do this work just like that, for nothing, just for fun!” (Commonwealth, 186)

Not only is the concept of some sort of essential industriousness and reproductive telos intrinsic to nature challenged by this model, but it offers a narrative that resists the heteronormative couple and family. Hardt and Negri interpret Guattari’s comment arguing that:

Wasps and orchids do not suggest any morality tale of marriage and stable union, as bees and flowers do, but rather evoke scenarios of cruising and serial sex…This is not to say that cruising and anonymous sex serve as a model of love to emulate for Guattari (or Genet, Wojnarowicz, or Delany), but rather that they provide an antidote to the corruptions of love in the couple and the family, opening love up to the encounter of singularities” (Commonwealth, 187).

Some of the more juvenile aspects of Steenberg’s rhetoric demonstrate how clearly the player is gendered as male (and the game/speaker female), but the Craigslist advertisement suggests that the love that will be given and received from this game is not the kind of love sanctioned by conventional, bourgeois morality. It is a love that more closely resembles Hardt and Negri’s wasp/orchid framework. Thus, the orgiastic and polymorphous potential of Love contrasts to what Steenberg depicts as the sexually-neutered status of capitalist-inflected gaming. The promise of a subscription to

Love, according to the Craigslist post, is the promise of serial sex. Given that Craigslist is notorious for its facilitation of casual erotic encounters with strangers, this is not sex in the service of reproductive futurity or a stable relationship, but sex that is, as Guattari rejoices, “just for fun.” The Craigslist press release frames Love’s players as an assemblage of anonymous cruisers circulating within the world seeking a form of serial love.

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Just for Fun

While productive participation in Love may be “just for fun,” it is important to understand this fun is neither politically neutral nor of the type that one might immediately associate as a purely diversionary ludic activity—Steenberg alludes to this in the Craigslist post by describing the game as “high maintenance.” Despite its appeal to an alternative and self-styled subversive libidinal economy, Love remains, in many ways, a product of the New Economy’s collapse of the distinction between work and leisure.67 In much the same way the wasp accomplishes a kind of work through his copulation with the orchid, the “fun” of Love is not only a simulation of labor in a virtual world, but is itself a form of work in which the player’s serial fun directly serves to propagate the game. The player is like Guattari’s wasps who “do this work just like that, for nothing, just for fun!”

In this respect, Steenberg’s approach to game development is a variation on the models that exists within the technology industry. Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de

Peuter provide a history of the videogame industry arguing:

At the start of their history, virtual games were a refusal of work: they signified leisure, hedonism, and irresponsibiliiy against clock punching, discipline, and productivity…As video game culture advanced into the new millennium, however, a strange reversal occurred. Games turned their coat, transforming from workplace saboteur to managerial snitch.” (28).

With the transformation of industrial time to that of an atomic clock—a workplace that was always ticking, almost expecting its employees to be working and contributing

67 From the white collar worker, the nineties transitioned to what Andrew Ross has termed the “no-collar” worker. In smaller new media and IT companies, the grey flannel suit was tossed out and substituted for a pair of designer jeans producing the “blue jean capitalist, preaching liberation management and ingesting organic food” (123). These knowledge workers mixed creativity with high-levels of technological ability. Ross charts the way in which the terms capitalism and labor were rejected by these companies (even as their workers committed to longer hours and more intense schedules). Employees were encouraged to believe that the activities they performed were not labor, but rather self-fulfilling challenges.

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whether at home or the office, the concept of leisure time disappeared with the forty- hour work week.

The result of this collapse of leisure time, “neo-leisure” as Andrew Ross characterizes it, has been the transformation of the workplace: “[m]anagers have had to accept that Web surfing, video games, news and pornography consumption, email and bulletin board correspondence, online solitaire, accounting for employees' time on the job” (88). In the new millennium, playtime is not just grudgingly accepted, but actively encouraged. In fact, the ability to have fun has become another job prerequisite.

According to Ross, “[t]hose who could not or did not know how to play were likely to be phased out over time” (88). Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter have cited some of the more surreal examples of the way in which the industry has co-opted the leisure of workers inside and out of the industry. They note how the practice of managing World of

Warcraft guilds is increasingly being listed on curriculum vitae and that at some point in the future “devices that tabulate gaming scores, such as the Xbox 360 Gamer Card” could be used to give employers “a great deal of information on how much time someone spends gaming, how skilled they are, how obsessive, how collaborative, how determined” (Robertson qtd in Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter, 30). Videogames are no longer marked off as a privileged site of escape or entertainment: they are now being increasingly channeled back into a business logic of productivity. As mentioned in the previous chapter regarding Left 4 Dead, gameplay analytics operate according to a kind

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of undead logic, in which one’s statistics become permanent information that is difficult

to delete, even if so desired.68

Serfdom 2.0

Love does not operate in a space divorced from the contemporary context of labor

practices, but is symptomatic of a new phase of those practices. Large corporations like

Zynga, Facebook, and Youtube are not the only companies that profit from user-

generated content, but it is now possible for an individual to charge a relatively small

sum for user subscriptions online in order to afford the server space to run a persistent

virtual world full-time. This new phase of labor allows a self-selected group of players to

enjoy the intellectual challenge of playing a game which has not been streamlined for

general consumption. Currently, there is much debate in both the games industry and

game studies over the concept of “gamification.” Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is

Broken (2011) accelerated the discussion through her argument that games have the

potential to change the world and increase happiness through meaningful and

rewarding labor. Gamification—the progressive conversion of all aspects of our life into

a game, including work, education, and our intimate social relations—brings with it the

dangerous risk of its being zealously and uncritically co-opted by business interests.

There is a difference, however, between the indeterminate status of play and labor

in Love and gamification. Most attempts to gamify labor or reality are a way of keeping

“players” occupied while speeding up and obfuscating work whereas Love makes the

work transparent. In games such as World of Warcraft, labor-intensive activities are

68 It is unsettling to imagine that if the university follows the lead of corporations in the New Economy that my unsteady aim and low percentage of headshots in Left 4 Dead might potentially directly influence a future tenure application [see chouxsalad’s statistics in Fig. 5-7, 5-8]).

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presented in such a way as to conceal the fact that skill-based gameplay has been replaced by methodical busy work. In Love, to be successful players must understand that they are doing something difficult both in and out of the game-space. To play the game, for many, is to program it.

This reciprocity between playing and programming cannot be taken for granted given that the networked coding practices of Love’s user-base both reflect and are reflected in the gameplay produced by Steenberg’s emergent system. To succeed in fending off various species of AI, players end up coding modules (like functions) which causally link together various in-game algorithms to sustain a human colony. For example, programming a windmill requires the player to not only position the object’s fan blades in relation to the fluctuating cycles of air currents which warm and cool by the light of the sun, but to also link this module to other objects in space like a force field, motion tracker, or medical supplier. When not engaging in this form of spatial or architectural coding, players might spend time submitting bug reports, brainstorming on the forums, or chatting with Steenberg. Given the depth and rigor of this community’s play, its hard to imagine this form of play that is substantially different from a computer programmer’s day job.

In the same way Guattari’s wasps copulate with orchids just for fun, these players ultimately end up contributing to the production of a relation of production. But this is different form of engagement compared to the labor that characterizes many videogames. Whereas Love shows how play is work, gamification tries to hide work in the form of play.

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Yet, there is one way in which Love as well as other independently-produced procedural games such as Minecraft69 and Dwarf Fortress are culturally in line with larger-scale MMOs such as World of Warcraft: an inordinate number of these games, strikingly, are set in pre-industrial environments. Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter have suggested that World of Warcraft depicts a nostalgic form of social beforer capitalism

(150), despite the fact that it is completely consumed by the logic of late capitalist, consumerist greed, and acquisition. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, and Love are similarly set in these pre-capitalist storyworlds (Figure 6-4). In addition to offering a nostalgic glance for a bygone way of life, I would argue that this circuit between contemporary gamers and agrarian, pre-industrial societies may not be merely an effect of nostalgia, but that it is also be tied in to some deeper structural resonances that emerge from the decline of industrial capitalism’s nine-to-five work schedule. A crucial ideological shift connected to the rise of the contemporary knowledge worker has been the perception that employment is no longer regarded as a job, but a lifestyle. Not only is a worker exploited through a normalized eighty-hour work weeks, but the no-collar creative worker is meant to enjoy it. Videogame companies offer an example of an industry dependent on creative labor in which employees are encouraged to view their work as forms of creative expression and self-fulfillment.

Along with the destruction of the punch clock comes the loss of leisure time (who needs leisure time when work is fun?). And it is in this respect that I wonder if these nostalgic representations of pre-industrial societies are not a way of expressing

69 Minecraft is far more accessible (and wildly successful) in comparison to Love. Designed by Markus Persson, aka Notch it is comprised of a landscape composed entirely of Lego-like Voxels that can be manipulated by the player.

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anxieties surrounding the current labor conditions under cognitive capitalism, in that they function as a kind of Serfdom 2.0 in developed nations. Pre-industrial, agrarian societies did not punch a clock—workers in those societies did not have a job—but a life and assigned social position, complexly enmeshed with relations of production of the larger social order. In the case of medieval societies, a serf’s life was defined by the particular kind of labor executed for a feudal lord. Love is the type of game that appeals specifically to individuals who work in technology industries—those who are most likely to find themselves in the strangely feudal labor conditions fostered by new media companies. The retreat into these virtual worlds in which, in cases such as World of

Warcraft, one finds a more pixellated version of the same commodified conditions of the

“real” world, is perhaps a way of expressing anxiety about the social and political failure of lifestyle careerism. While a life of hard labor, of tilling the soil, harvesting grain, and building settlements is far removed from the “immaterial” labor of game development, the erosion of the distinction between labor and leisure and the emergence of the 24- hour job does not, as many critics have observed, move us forward. In point of fact, it returns us to originary conditions of economic exploitation. The nostalgia for these old models of production is perhaps an oblique response to the labor structures of the New

Economy and its failure to deliver on its utopian promise of the end of work. If we think of Love as an expression of a recursive return to older models of labor and empire, then we can read the game as a kind of virtual city state, with Steenberg governed by notions of noblesse oblige—a lord tending to his subjects after they agree to pay a small tithe in order to occupy his land.

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In addition to this economic argument, one can also read this nostalgia in relation to the way in which digital culture has inspired the return of pre-literate/pre-industrial paradigms. In chapter four I discussed the way in which digital database storytelling has inspired a return to earlier modes of production. Ed Folsom demonstrated the kinship between oral and digital storytelling arguing that “database may well be epic's new genre” (1578). The serial, episodic structure of Love in which players see the rise and fall of their miniature worlds creates the conditions for epic storytelling that reinforces this return to pre-industrial models of production. Notably, Hardt and Negri’s concept of political love also involves a similar return to older historical models: “We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions”

(Multitude, 351).

Re-imagining Fun

The increase in successful small-scale efforts produced by teams of one or two individuals offers a potential space for the development of different forms of subjectivity and relationships to the games in which we choose to invest our time at play. Yet for some, even the more mechanical and coercive forms of gaming are also regarded as source of potential. Jane McGonigal examines the serial conditions of games in order to demonstrate the power of their collective labor force:

Playing World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it…To put that number in perspective: 5.93 million years ago is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first stood upright. By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing World of Warcraft as we’ve spent evolving as a species. (53)

While she draws attention to the impressive numbers, many would be hesitant to argue that World of Warcraft is a productive form of evolution. McGonigal’s optimism for the particular type of gameplay offered by World of Warcraft appears strangely perverse in

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this context. She makes an intriguing contrast between diachronic evolution and this serial, synchronic form of collective transformation, but it is important to ask: is this really the kind of “evolution” we want? A world advanced through level dings and the spilled blood of Horde and Alliance? If we are going to find the potential of games, if we are going to find love in the “telematic embrace,” to borrow Roy Ascott’s term, there must be something more offered from human-computer interaction.

It is on this point which Steenberg attempts to dream of games which are not defined in the terms that have been set by the mainstream games industry. Steenberg imagines a world of computing that did not normalize the GUI and bind the operations of the screen to the metaphor of the desktop. Rather than the brand of utopianism championed by McGonigal, Love comes closer to Tom Moylan’s notion of the “critical utopia”:

A central concern in the critical utopia is the awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as a blueprint while preserving it as a dream. Furthermore, novels dwell on the conflict between the originary world and the utopian society opposed to it so that the process of social change is more directly articulated. Finally, the novels focus on the continuing presence of difference and imperfection within the utopian society itself and thus render more recognizable and dynamic alternatives. (10–11)

Classic utopia evokes a world that is fixed and permanent, one in which a code has been written and will continue to execute without any significant transformation. A critical utopia, alternatively, is procedural—it is a “process of social change” and we see this process of change both within the logic of the game as well as the game’s production. Games such as Love offer a serial gameplay experience in which the player can never fully predict how the game will transform with the latest patch. They are steeped in the logic of the critical utopia and this is particularly exemplified by Love. As

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a project it is perpetually in a state of incompletion (it will likely never be finished, but either set aside or transformed into something no longer recognizable from its initial versions). Like Moylan’s description of a critical utopia, Love is not only incomplete, but it is flawed. Players accept and work with its imperfections as part of the social contract agreed upon when playing the game. Moreover, the gameplay itself is based on the procedural logic of a critical utopia. Love presents an emergent virtual landscape that is unstable and unpredictable. And, as a result, terrifying.

It is for this reason that most game companies enjoy deploying the rhetoric of emergence, gamer agency, and freedom but ultimately must reign in these elements, particularly for the production of mass-market games (e.g., Left 4 Dead’s AI Director, discussed in the previous chapter, is an excellent example of a game whose emergent elements are paradoxically revealed to be a form of undead servitude). Freedom, as performed in these games, is not necessarily “fun.” The freedom offered within procedural landscapes can be deeply frustrating, the strange confluences of unpredictable phenomena and glitches interfering with the best made plans of designers and players. Players work together as part of a commons dedicated to establishing settlements, yet these interactions can be strained and filled with social and technical conflicts. For many, this is the pleasure of the game, but this rugged, inhospitable landscape does not offer the type of fun that will ever translate into a best-seller (despite critical acclaim).

Steenberg’s self-made tools and alien GUIs employ glyphs that are not informed by the visual history of commercial software. They are not directed by the myth of intuitive, populist design (the most common design strategy since Apple’s Lisa was first

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commercially available) which renders invisible persistent metaphors that structured and continue to structure the present era of the human-computer interface (Harpold 227).

This is not to say the game is exclusionary (although it is certainly a self-selected group of players), but as the game’s name, Love, suggests, there are numerous ways a player can get support both through direct communication with veteran players as well as incredibly thorough tutorials and descriptions that fans have made available. Yet the game does require effort. The interface and the world Steenberg has designed pushes back. Espen Aarseth’s now slightly dated term “ergodic literature” was initially defined in

Cybertext (1997) as the “nontrivial effort…required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (1). His concept has frequently been used to describe games which require forms of engagement that are “interactive” only on the most superficial, kinetic level, but Love comes closer to the more complex operations for which Aarseth initially conceived of the term “ergodic.” Love also comes close to what N. Katherine Hayles more recently describes in Electronic Literature (2009) as a “dynamic heterachy,” which she defines as the process by which “different levels continuously inform and mutually determine each other" (45). Hayles characterizes the interaction between different media, between humans and machines, and between code and language as forms of dynamic heterarchies.

What Aarseth calls ergodic and Hayles a dynamic heterarchy, from another perspective would fall under the category of dialectic. From Hegel through Adorno and

Jameson, the dialectic can be regarded as a model of political emergence. Hayles’ model of the dynamic heterarchy lacks the politicization built into dialectical forms, but the mechanics are not structurally dissimilar. Love behaves dialectically in that the

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game software does not immediately feel intuitive or like a naturalized, organic

“extension” of the user (à la McLuhan). It pushes back and creates resistance for the player as a way of producing both emergent mechanics as well as emergent forms of social organization—a critical utopia that arises from what Mary Flanagan in her recent book describes as “critical gameplay” (Critical Gameplay: Radical Game Design, 2009).

By developing a unique set of glyphs in non-natural language for his GUI, Steenberg transforms the game into something that looks and feels strange. It literally looks like alien technology, indecipherable symbols of a kind one might find on an unknown spacecraft. Steenberg’s emphasis is on otherness rather than user-friendliness.

Thus, more significant and productive than Steenberg’s actual project is the idea of what it does and its relative autonomy from the design contexts of most other games.

This is a sentiment similarly felt with games like Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress is a strategy game that has only the most minimal ASCII graphics, but requires huge amounts of processing power in order to generate complex procedural histories of entire civilizations. A game beloved by computer and game programmers, but unknown to most game players, it re-imagines a history of computers which has not been dominated by graphics and spectacle, but rather processing and procedural mechanics. These games figure an alternative history, a “what if” statement gesturing towards the lost opportunities that might have emerged had commercial games not adhered to a

Hollywood-style studio system of development based around big-ticket games that rely on standardized gaming conventions, standardized toolsets, and visual spectacle.

Writing about Jameson’s “dialectic of utopia,” Phil Wegner argues for the transformative and pedagogical potential of an engagement with utopia and utopian desire. Utopia

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gestures, he says, towards the future “horizon of the ‘not yet’” and that the failure to look towards these possible futures is what has led to a “conception of the present as a closed totality or an iron cage from within which any change becomes not only impossible but well-nigh unimaginable” (“Horizons, Figures, and Machines,” 59).

Love invites its players to wonder what would have happened if Steenberg’s experimental modes of production as opposed to those of Nintendo and Sony had become the dominant mode of production. As Steenberg himself comments, “Love is about making the games that I thought everyone would be making by now” (“Q&A”).

The utopian mechanics of these games open up a multiplicity of unrealized futures. In doing so these games not only point towards a “not yet,” but a “never was”— lost moments in the history of games which might have emerged had videogames not been so tightly locked to one particular upgrade path defined by the demands of neoliberalism.

To bring this study full circle, I return to a passage written by Fredric Jameson from Archaeologies of the Future cited in the first chapter as a counterpoint to the success of Blondie: “at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment ... and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively” (xiii). Perhaps more than any other medium (with the exception of comics after the invention of the Comics Code Authority in 1984) videogames have the infamous honor of being subject to the most rigid economic and generic “imprisonment”. And thus the failure of Steenberg’s utopian experiment with the production of Love’s foregrounds these constraints most acutely.

Love offers a mode of gameplay based around community and the production of a

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common. Rather than victory and conquest, it emphasizes accepting failure, as all efforts in the game will inevitably be eroded by geological forces. Love shows us not only a different way of not only playing but also making games and we see this horizon of possibility when looking through the lens of Steenberg’s alien graphic user interfaces and programming tools.

If much of my dissertation has been occupied with a discussion of various forms of serial death, I would like to end with a call for Serial Love. I began with Blondie, a representation of familial love that naturalized heteronormative, middle-class forms of kinship, to depict and substantiate the figure of a universalized, transhistorical nuclear family. This form of seriality was best represented by Benedict Anderson’s theory of bound and unbound seriealities (a model rooted in the economic and technological conditions of industrial print culture) and culminated with the family in fact becoming weaponized to defend the United States against Cold War atomic threats by making them the friendly face of nuclear power. I began with a love that was perhaps (already) dead, or rather post-apocalyptic and undead, represented as a fixed and unchanging variable on the daily pages of national newspapers.

Love, by contrast, is not forever. It is a form of political love that will not last—is not meant to last. In much the same way that Guattari described the ludicaly-productive- and-also-non-reproductive sex between wasp and orchid, the casual encounters that brought the players into this commons will eventually cease. Serial love, following Hardt and Negri’s notion of political love, is polymorphous perverse; an amorphous, ever- shifting assemblage of subjectivities and collectivities that engage and transform each other dialectically. Serial love leads to the production of new, unanticipated

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subjectivities. In the example of Love, one finds an organization of players who have collectively self-assembled in order to play a game which is being released over an extended period of time not as a means to an end, but as the end itself. Love is not about outsourcing beta-testers and working towards a slick, high-performing final commodity, but produces a community dedicated to reinventing the process by which games are generated and played. Love attempts to create a community of players open to possibilities of constant transformation—open to a serial logic, in which you cannot be sure what will happen next.

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FIGURES

Figure 6-1. The conflation of human and emergent architecture

Figure 6-2. The emergent effects of fire on in-game architecture

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Figure 6-3. Some of Steenberg’s homemade toolsets

Figure 6-4. Screenshots of Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Stephanie Boluk holds a Bachelor of Arts from Concordia University and a Masters of Arts from McGill University. She has forthcoming articles in Leonardo Electronic

Almanac, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and an essay collection, Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern

Culture, that is co-edited with Wylie Lenz and forthcoming with McFarland and Co. After receiving her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida, she he will begin a post- doctoral fellowship in the Media Studies program at Vassar College.

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