I want to begin to explore an element of the 1998 interactive fiction Bad Machine that Marielle brought up on Thursday at the end of our group’s presentation: the subjection position or identity of the protagonist. On the work’s own immediate terms, the protagonist has no subject position. as we conventionally understand it Bad Machine doesn’t explicitly triangulate its protagonist’s identity along axes of race, gender, or sexuality because this protagonist is a machine. We might interpret its newly-sentient protagonist as a homophilic fantasy of creatio ex nihilo and therefore enmeshed in a male gendering. Or we might identify this protagonist as racialized because described and procedurally characterized as “Mover 005” and therefore a product of the ascriptive typing that, following Lisa Nakamura and Alexander Galloway, inheres in all digital interfaces—and perhaps, in mediation itself (Nakamura 101-135, Galloway 132-133).
However, I’m not sure this would tell us anything very useful. I want to take a different route and try to open up what it means for an interactive fiction’s protagonist to be a machine—and moreover, a bad machine that we’re procedurally focalized through via an emphatically reflexive text parser form. To do this I’ll approach the work through Jacques Rancière’s account of the politics of aesthetics (I read the Rancière this week and, as I think this blog post shows, I’m anxious to find a writerly outlet for it). Rancière’s quite abstract theory can be, I think, compellingly concretized in Bad Machine because the interactive fiction’s genre-reflexive exploration of what it means to play with a computer so clearly formalizes the fundamental opposition between necessity and freedom that subtends oppositions of computer/game or machine/play. Ultimately, I want to show how Bad Machine can be read as a procedural theory of the aesthetic, and raise some questions about what the interactive fiction might be able to remind us about the neoliberal politics of identities or subject positions.
Bad Machine is set in the “Warehouse,” a space in which all time must be instrumentalized, in work, toward the production of an unspecified “Product.” We don’t know if this is a capitalist space of labor because it is populated entirely by machines. With no account of human labor time, we have no account of exploitation and accordingly no concept of capital. More on this later. For now, I want to attend to how Bad Machine’s socio-economic world depicts a certain relationship between what we do and what we know—between work and making sense. We encounter this relationship as a procedural experience of the Warehouse’s space of fully automated work. Following Jacques Rancière, we might provisionally call this space of work an ethos: an “ethical circle that ties together a location, an occupation, and the aptitude—the sensory equipment—that is geared toward them” (4). The ethos of Bad Machine’s protagonist is signified by their name, Mover 005, and conditioned by the rules of the Warehouse in which all the well functioning machines police each other. For Rancière, an ethos is a social operation: the “ethical ordering of social occupations [that] ultimately occurs in the mode of an as if” (8), by which he means that an ethos is the categorical imperative that what we do, and the social position this accords us, make sense to us. An ethos adequates a body to a certain distribution of the sensible. An ethos is an operation of automation in the sense that it contains a body within a certain kind of sense-making and compels it to repeat.
So while Rancière intends his notion of ethos to apply to humans, we can see that an ethos, taken seriously, makes humans functionally equivalent to robots. An ethos is a program (this is why Alexander Galloway, following but abbreviating Rancière, describes the computer not as an ontology but as an “ethic or a practice, in that it introduces a structure of action, a recipe for moving procedurally toward a certain state of affairs” [120]). The notion of ethos is Rancière’s way of approaching the aesthetic dimension of class struggle. If an ethos is the primary “as if” that adjudicates and naturalizes “the manner of being and feeling” particular to a subject’s class position, the aesthetic dimension of this subject’s experience opens upon the construction of a secondary “as if” that ruptures the ethos of their class position (8), producing a glitch in its program. Bad Machine explores what happens when the aesthetic ruptures an ethos and a program becomes a game. Rancière’s theory of what (or how) precisely the aesthetic consists is beyond the scope of this little essay. But it suffices to say here that the aesthetic is in excess of the ethical. It’s a distribution of the sensible that is indifferent because it suspends any opposition between our faculties of signification and sensation (knowing and feeling) without omitting them (“a positive neither/nor” of these faculties [Rancière 2]). Anyways… In Bad Machine, we procedurally navigate the aesthetic as a rupture in the ethos of our machine protagonist as we input commands that, determined by our choice, transform a good machine that works dutifully into a bad machine that starts playing around and, in a utopic turn, eventually escapes the Warehouse.
The aesthetic dimension perturbs ethos toward play and the utopic. This event of perturbation is the interactive fiction’s point of origination, therefore we only encounter it retrospectively. After inputting commands and wandering around the Warehouse for some time, bumping into good machines, we discover that it is only because some disaster shook up our protagonist’s hardwired ethos that they, no longer just a Mover-class machine, became a bad machine. This disaster is the condition of possibility of Bad Machine because it produces the rupture in the hardwired legality of its protagonist’s ethos that we, the interactant, are able to slip into and inhabit as agency. In this way, the interactive fiction procedurally demonstrates how agency—the ability to sense and do otherwise—is a rupture, gap, or split in an ethos, and therefore always already aesthetic. Our agency as interactant triggers the interactive fiction’s originary disaster and the opening of its aesthetic dimension as a game: we are the “Bad” in Bad Machine.
Bad Machine is a (deeply reflexive) simulation of what it means to play with computers that presents us with an aesthetic meditation on (a rupturing of) a turn-of-the-millenium ethos of digital labor. And if we take its fully automated workplace setting more broadly as a sci-fi allegory of the neoliberal regime of labor in the U.S., how do we understand its protagonist’s “bad machine” subject position? Is our procedural focalization through this subject position an experience of dawning class consciousness? Taking this interpretive possibility seriously, I want to suggest that Bad Machine hails us, the reader or interactant, to identify with the subject position of its protagonist according to a convergence of the logics of identity and class position that ends up neutralizing the specificity of each of these logics. For their would seem to be no class positionality in the world of Bad Machine that is not a form of identity or subject position. In the Warehouse labor is fully automated and frictionless so that the politics of identity and class—who we think we are and our place in an economic structure, respectively—fuse curiously into what I’ve called, following Rancière, an ethos. Is ethos what we’re left with in a neoliberal era defined by what Wendy Chun rightly calls “allegedly postideological, post-class-based networks?” Indeed, Chun explores this question in relation to the concept of habit in Updating to Stay the Same, which we’re reading for next Tuesday (8). To be continued, I guess.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. Psychology Press, 2002.
Rancière, Jacques. “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge.” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 1 (2009): 1–19.
Shiovitz, Dan. Bad Machine, 1998. http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/shiovitz__bad_machine.html.
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