Strategy as Enclosure

In order for a game of Chess to enter in checkmate, the King isn’t simply captured, but put into a state of absolute capture, a state unique for not being the capture of all squares surrounding the King, the capture of all potential Kings in every possible square the King could travel to. In order for these squares to be captured, they must be threatened in some way, that is the enemy has the potential ability to move onto that square in some way, thus “controlling” that square as their territory. In this way, territory in Chess works identical as it does in Go, on the principle of territorial control. In Go however, territorial control is abstracted - as opposed to a general good principle underlying play, territorial control is the win condition, read at the endgame as abstract quantity. In Go, both territory and armies have no face, no identity, but a multiplicity which represents a presence of one side or the other. The transformation which Go makes upon Chess is done in in reverse in the transformation Multiwinia makes upon Chess. In Go, the territory and military, both present, are unified under the central principle of territory, with military being only implied in the drama of marking territory. The opposite remains true in Multiwinia, where territory is only implied in the manipulation of a multiplicity of soldiers. Again, like the stones of Go, abstracted to be only a multiplicity of a team, but a multiplicity of troops which are manipulated through the game in various ways in order to attain objectives, with the same dramas of territorial control still being present, but only implied beneath the surface.

This unification of territory and soldier to one force speaks to the discourse of warfare, which is that of enclosure. Each invasion, each conquest, is here recognized for its central aim, which is the ability to gain control through two dynamics, Military and Territory, the former being the forces which mark out the boundaries of that which is enclosed and the latter being that which is enclosed, the drama being the attempt to successfully complete this enclosure so that Territory can be utilized (for whatever purpose) freely, without competition from enemy Military attempting to enclose it for themselves.

With the advent of immense technological gulfs, traditional wars between colonial powers and their subjects were won before they even begin, with enclosure being able to occur (in the eyes of the enclosing power) often without the full knowledge of the human lives being enclosed. What occurs thereafter is a war which is not a war, a war which is a series of atrocities in attempts to force the claimedly objective truth upon the population which has been supposedly enclosed. It is here that infinite violence can occur, as those within the enclosed territory are not enemies, but reduced to less than human by virtue of their being wrong - an aberration against the holiness of “truth”, against the objective fact of the territory’s nature as a property of the force which enclosed it.