Back to the Steppes

 

In Counter-Strike’s Gun Game/Arms Race mode, war machines are, through the technologies and frameworks of contemporary conflict, returned to and then transformed by the steppe. The isolated players or teams operate against each other nomadically, moving freely through the map, mediated between each other only by their own technologies and movements. Unlike the state capture of the regular game mode, where the war machines operate beneath the capture of politically charged narratives (IDF defusing bombs planted by Palestinians, FBI rescuing hostage office workers held by Anarchists) and their ability to operate being constrained by their ability to operate in these narratives (financially and the direction of their actions) the more free form gamemodes use the purely nomadic logic of death match. As the player moves through the map, interacting through war with the other machines, they morph and change, the weapons held by the player changing as the player levels up. Victory is achieved through the one who most effectively gives into this corruption, the one who is molded the most to the war, getting a kill with the apex weapon, most distant from their native SMG.

This appears as the greatest and deepest expression of a trend that’s gained extreme prominence in recent years, expressed today in Battle Royale games. There’s been a steep uptrend in recent years towards these game modes, Minecraft Hunger Games to PUBG to Fortnite, the war machine has gone above and beyond in prominence, with the Battle Royale even conforming to the steppe in the minor details, small pockets of resource allocation and large open fields on which battle is done. In all of these, the logic of the state-captured war machine is breaking down, as machines are made to emerge distant from the scenarios which caused their capture in the first place.

War machines emerging after state capture occurs this way in terrorism within the civilized world. The state captured war machine as the primary expression of the war machine slips away steadily as the state is no longer constituted through the existence of the war machine as in a contested territory or expanding empire. With the war machine acting as the way to secure the state against contests to its existence, the war machine was able to allow itself to be captured by being the means through which the state was able to constitute itself, thereby forming a codependant relationship. With these relationships solidified in many parts of the world, the state secured by means of itself and its military being yoked to the stability of the state and not the constitutor of the state (the NATO nation state as opposed to the expanding empire, the borders determined by impotent treaties as opposed to endless conflict), the war machines begin to die off within the state and emerge independently just as they did originally.

Such is reflected not only in the art of these cultures, steadily producing violent works moving more and more towards solitary war, waged against equally solitary enemies on the open wilderness of the stratified urban landscape, cities no more unreal or anti-human than the forest or plains. The same occurs politically and apolitically, with terrorism and mass shootings replicating the dynamic, war machines being broken down to the individual level, where the pseudo-state of a cell or sect has now scattered to the singular lone wolf, the trajectory from Tom Metzger to Brenton Tarrant.