The Quest for a New Man
The supposedly central quest of the game is completely illusory. Adam’s obsession with Megan is so poorly conveyed and motivated as to border on farcical, the strange justifications of a madman as he rampages across the world at the whims of his employer, telling himself it’s all for the sake of the object of fascination, Megan Reed. The conclusion of this quest, culminating in a stark white room where he encounters her, shows the truth of this quest. Throughout the quest, what really takes place is Adam being guided along an episodic journey to become who was destined to be, an esoteric quest towards his destiny guided by the hand of this desire. That Megan is out of his grasp matters little, Megan ultimately being a trick played on Adam to make him undergo his transformation.
Two Cities
The sidequests in Detroit make the player return again and again to the same locations, the DRB-occupied ruined block, the mass of apartments, the police station. In these locations, hostile humans are compacted into dense complexes, forming a tightly compacted maze of flesh and heat with which to do violence. Flesh and violence makes up the theme of Detroit, with the pure humans turning to rioting and flailing against the semi-robotic riot police, the main gang antagonist being the larger and unaugmented crew, the comments from purity-seeking hobos, and etc. The populace of Detroit is a populace left behind, wallowing in the decay of a city forgotten by history, in the null death of a human body untouched by advances in the human organism’s evolution.
The human in Hengsha is situated not as a part of it, another piece of grime on the bottom of the street, but against it, navigating it as an outsider. Hengsha is a city of capital and technology. Every part of its construction is built for higher, machinic purposes, with the player visiting centers of consumption and production, nightclubs, market streets, construction sites, dockyards, etc. The dramas taking place are dramas of interaction against these inhuman machines of economics and technology, being stricken down with augment malfunctions, resisting forced augmentation, struggling against the power of capital and technology. The motif recurring in showing this binary is that of vertical transition. Multiple missions deal with humans thrown down great descents in the Youzhao district, the design itself is vertical, Jensen navigates in story progression in ways that cross-cut the layers of the city, emerging from the construction site of the ambush, climbing the TYM tower through both layers of Hengsha. Vertical transition shows the free movement through an inhuman structure such as the city of Hengsha, an image of humanity after technology.
Bull, Mantis, Snake
Barrett and his forces appear occupying the facility of another, a large complex of purchased factories and a FEMA facility. His personal title and style is the first and most brutish form of martial power, that of mere presence, of power manifesting as the baton or beating, the logistical and guardian work of the war machine.
Federova’s presence comes from nothing, the deferred presence of Eliza, first leading Adam from room 404 (not found), then to the unknown part of the Picus building, only to discover that Eliza herself is not. Federova’s original appearance in the opening is her emerging and then quickly making herself vanish again, a way of fighting she uses against Jensen, making generous use of cloaking abilities. Her attempt to kill Adam from behind shows her role, the tip of the spear, the surgical piercing end of the war-machine, manifesting in the single instant the bullet impacts.
In a room of muscle-bodies, Namir comes out as one of them, a deconstructed specimen of a person, naked in a sense more extreme that simple unclothedness, his appearance laying bare the foundational operations of a human. If the player bought into the narrative of the game enough to get themselves upgraded, Zhao strips them of their augmentations for the fight. Adam winning against him is a stripped-down contest of war machines against each other, an image of two nude warriors wrestling to prove their rawest individual prowess. Incorporating the tactics of the other two, Adam and Namir engage as an apex of Adam’s entire conflict against Belltower, against the enemy soldiers throughout the entire game.
Selection for Fitness
In the second “first” mission, the more advanced tutorial after Jensen’s been augmented, the player is tasked with surgically solving a hostage situation in the Milwaukee Junction factory. The Purity First members have attempted to throw their flesh upon the assembly lines, forcibly stopping technological production. Jensen’s removal of them occurs by reminding them of the situation they’ve found themselves in. Far over their heads, Jensen solves the final dialogue challenge by convincing Zeke of his impotence in the face of the superior power of war, competing ultimately, with technological and economic capabilities far beyond their comprehension, retreating in timid fear of a lower creature back to the unaugmented sewers.
Jensen’s conjecture against them, the superiority over pure humans, is tested in The Missing Link, when Jensen finds himself on the other end, the captive and subject of another antagonizing him. In both of these fights, what occurs is evolutionary competition between organisms. Stripped and forced to rebuild himself, Jensen passes through the various gateways as he triumphs against Belltower, his competitor in the struggle for dominance. By killing Burke in stealth, the achievement is “Apex Predator” as Jensen proves himself the superior being above and beyond Belltower.
Viruses & CPUs
The first encounter with Zhao Yun Ru occurs at the apex of the Tai Yong Medical building, a tower ascending like a flower from the productive substratum of Hengsha. The building is decorated in tune with this metaphor, green and orange with various botanical shapes drawn along its interiors and the only unclouded sunlight of the game being visible from its upper corridors. The new form of life that Adam represents in his namesake, the first of a new type of human, grows from this fertile garden of biotechnology. Upstaging all his predecessors, he proves himself worthy by nature’s test, selecting to the peak of augmented-human perfection.
Zhao is met again at the bottom of Panchea, where she fails, being overwhelmed by the machine she attempts to unify herself with by performing the same integration as the captive human calculators the computer uses. All of these captive humans and Zhao are killed, purged from the system. When Adam achieves the ending, his final meeting is with Eliza Cassan, recognizing her as his only true equal. Both Adam and Eliza have the same fundamental nature in that they remain a whole organism at the peak of their chosen machine. Zhao was purged as a foreign entity, as were the captives, for being only pieces, as expendable as it would be for Adam to replace his arm with a new one. Eliza in the same way, could lose infinitely many devices spreading Picus, computers below her, as long as her central intelligence remains intact. When the Hyron Project purged the flesh invading its body, it did so just as the crazed people in Panchaea desperately tried to purge the invading biochip from their own body, desperately attempting to retain the stability of the unified organism. The next evolutionary step of technology is not, as Zhao sees it, a singularity of all things, but a new type of entity, a biotech animal, evolved and formed by the template that Adam evolved and was formed in the progress of the game.
Combining the complexly ordered collection of Bob and Barbara’s hoarding, it’s no surprise that Chris acquired the pathological relationship towards possessions he did. This relationship towards objects however, had another component which informed the intense strangeness of it, that is his autistic typology of personhood. There is an anecdote he gives, where he lost his ability to speak for several years, regaining it via reading the text on the back of a toy’s packaging. This can be read as something deeply pivotal in the structuring of his mind. Reading or watching even a surface level amount of his content will reveal one striking fact about all of it - it is completely informed in its form by media. His comics have odd arrangements and devices, all of which are such through being poor imitations of other tropes of staging and arrangement seen in animation or cartoons elsewhere. His speech is inflected in the same way, with each sentence being noticeably composed so as to be an imitation of a cartoon character’s voice, without real regard to the specificity of that character.
Bob’s career as a mid-level engineer awarded him with a great deal of comfort and status in his local society, the fruits of which can be seen in the parodic views Chris reflected in speaking of politics while he was alive. Bob’s life is one best shown in the funhouse reflection of Kacey’s Father, a character Chris has a phone conversation with in which he is berated using a variety of standard American conservative talking points on the virtue of work and the immorality of Chris’ consumptive life. In Kacey’s Father, is the ethos that sustained Bob, an altogether mediocre and petty man, following it dutifully in wageslavery and reaping the rewards of the American middle class.
For this middle class ethos, there is an equation of consumption and labor that structures their life. Bob and Kacey’s Father balanced the equation perfectly and thus have nothing but contempt for Chris, who refuses to one end of the life, he exists in consumption without justifying himself through work. Many have reacted to Chris with the sentiment that their fascination comes from how easily it could have been them in the sonichu medallion and rugby shirt, displaying the horror of imbalance, the horror of the perfect equation of labor and consumption going out of balance.
Throughout this post, the term “middle class” has been used uncritically, but this is suspension is only in order to let it down easily. In a basic Marxian analysis, the middle class is fundamentally illusory. Still relying on wage labor to sustain themselves, owning no profit-generating property, they are simply a class of laborer fed with excess fats of the wealthiest nations on Earth, giving the delusion to something different from the common prole. Yet their enrichment is not out of some altruistic or accidental means, but rather has a specific function, shown in the other half of the equation. With the actual production being done through colonialism and its attendant slavery (always infinitely more foundational for capitalism than the urban prole ever was), the middle class is often tasked with useless work, managerial or clerical busywork, abstractions upon abstractions of paperwork liked by none. While this often has the basic utility of managing larger economic engines, it has no need to do this. It is perfectly possible to have a completely useless middle class worker for the reason that their true economic role is not production or management, but stimulating capital flow for its own sake. The middle class is encouraged in a way the upper and lower classes are not, to consume endlessly, sold endless piles of products and goods to structure their lifestyle with. Their wages are so high in order that they can go towards purchasing of these goods, thus converting production into liquid capital and stimulating the flow of value by not only giving value to and then discarding produced goods, but also returning value as liquid capital. The middle class exists for this and this alone, as a class of purchasers, tasked with stimulating capital flow, in order to keep the markets of production and distribution generating liquid profit.
Innovating on the common RPG trope of monster drops, Dark Souls introduces the idea of the “soul” as an item released upon death of an enemy. The basic idea of the drop is innovated to its always present conclusion in this, where the item once dropped as the expression of what that monster was in life now literally referred to as it functions, the soul of that monster. The brief description of the attained item gives a thesis statement on the monster encountered as well allowing the player to recreate the essence of that monster for themselves, crafting the soul into a weapon that mimics their attacks.
That the soul produces the ability to imitate the attacks of the monster shows that the soul produces what beget it in the first place. The boss appears to the player and only exists in the context of what the boss does unto the player, ie their attacks. That the soul would replicate the attacks, makes the soul return full around to what originally stated the personhood of the boss to the player, their attacks, their actions in relation to the player.
This is a more radical turn than is understood at first interpretation. The soul post-dates the encounter with the person, the being comes as a result of the becoming. The linkages of this to other thinkers are obvious - identity emerges from performance (one is not born, but becomes, as de Beauvoir said) and thus the personhood is created as an accumulation of all that person is.
The opposite of this is pervasive, the platonic referencing to an ideal or higher realm granting personhood. The idea of a platonic soul appears even in cases where the spiritual is on the surface, dead and removed. Often in debates over moral guilt of those who commit violent and criminal acts, the debate goes between two sides endlessly adjudicating the criminal’s immortal soul. One proposes inborn explanations, biological race, gender, etc, the other proposes environmental explanations, systemic obstacles, mental illness, etc. Both of these are ultimately making the same fault and thus are utterly indistinguishable. Both assume that the victim is tabula rasa an immortal soul which was then degenerated into the being they are now, coming up of theories of why a being would do this thing that most beings do not.
The way out of this debate is to recognize that being only occurs as an accumulation of becomings. The being of an individual to everyone except themselves is a creature made by the effects that consciousness had on the world, a composite images of all the marks they’ve left on everything around them. It does not matter whether the criminal had any motivating factors, because what matters is that they’ve made themselves ontologically immoral by becoming-immoral, by committing an immoral act.
The individual made of becomings shows another radical truth of this - the individual ultimately doe not exist outside of themselves. Their personhood is only real in one way to others, with the consciousness being fundamentally not their personhood, but the conductor attempting to steer the construction of their personhood by dictating its becomings. Contra Thatcher, it is the individual which does not exist, only being a consciousness navigating the great mesh of all interlocked effections and becomings.
Heat forces the segmented chunks into motion, the pieces fighting for control in great cataclysmic dramas. The minerals at play, now in the freemoving play of agitated molecules, soup together to become primitive bacteria, feasting on the floating particles from which they emerged. As the primordial reactions cool into relative stability, the new forms grow out, the basic seed of the family tree of all life, slowly expanding from its deepest roots (still visible on deep-ocean vents, sucking down plutonic gasses) onto the newly solidified continents.
In reading the world around them, the common mistake of the American nature writer, no doubt schooled in all the pioneering sciences of the new continent, is to believe what he sees to be an assemblage of verticalities. This appears in their narratives, tales of audubon-correct collections of sights seen, leaping off the page like listing off a catalogue.
A rabbit nibbles on grass, pressed furtively into the marshloam. Shadows and sounds dance at the periphery of its awareness to the horizon. A raptor soars from the globe-wrapping winds, from cirrus-skies, sighting its dash, descending to bring down forces of beak and talon into its flesh, piercing its skin and dragging it through the ground, settling in momentum with the corpse transmuted to meat. When it returns to the air, successions of consumers take their morsels until the corpse has been reduced to the nitrogen, seeds deposited from the raptor’s winds embedding deep to spring up the next generations.
Beginning in the civilized world, he enters nature removed from it. While in awe, his awe is that of an invader, of an outsider, humbled before the face of a great God before him. As such, his journey into nature is just that - a journey, a passage. He conducts himself as an alien in another’s land. It is for this reason that American naturalism is obsessed with preserving some platonic ideal of the forest, disallowing even limited usage and artificially forcing it to not react or change in tune with the world around it. The consequences of this can be seen in the great Yellowstone fire of 1988, where a crown fire destroyed more than ever imagined by human insistence that no fire should occur in their Garden of Eden.
Vapors collect at the mercy of the wrapped winds, condensing to heavy finalities, cirrus wisps accumulating to stormclouds. When their weight grows too much to bear, their mass descends to Earth as liquid water. Hydrophilia forms puddles, forms streams, wears down channels, inscribing its movement downhill into what it should fall upon. At the terminus, what was stripped from the land and what fell to the ground returns as sand, as mineral, as water, to the watery depths it all emerged from, the beginning, the end.
For the technologically inclined, their life is structured around asymmetrical relationships with a particular dynamic. The singular user is situated below a machine into which they plug. This dynamic informs technological structure. The single user appears again in the form of the client, connecting to the server through the HTTP protocol. The machine to be plugged into opens up as a world, an environment, within which the user slots into.
The user enters the machine in order to engage in mechanisms which the machine offers to the user to input libidinal energies. These mechanisms are platforms, various forms which enable content creation. Content expresses itself through the form of the platform, the website, the trend, the game, the toolkit, etc.
The products of these platforms interact with each other in ways which spawn new mutations via linguistic interactions of interpretation during the user’s reception of the products of their machines. In turn, as new products emerge, the users are inspired to input into higher order platforms with creating sub-platforms of their own. These dynamics can be seen at play in meme culture and in game creation. In both, the original creates a product, the meme shared and read or the game experience, which is consumed and reinterpreted. When this interpretation occurs via an act of writing sublimated into the platform, the platform’s products mutate via plurality of products in one space, thus allowing for mutation to occur.
The question then arises of how these memes turn into platforms or rather function as platforms. The answer lies in the nature of online revenue, which is gained through clicks or ads, the attention economy. Return again to the schema of the user and their machine. The individual user is plugged into a device alien to themselves, sublimating their libidinal energies into a form. By this, the meme itself functions as integral to the platform, as viewing or interacting with it in consumptive fashion requires some amount of plugging-into the platform, even if that plugging-in does not result in production of any tangible results.
Recognition of this has been building in the objective metrics of libido sacrificed to a platform chased after by those who convert these metrics into currency via ancient occult techniques of turning mass libido into monetary liquid. The interlinked social media presences and brand sales of an e-celeb are done in order to make their presence more than mere personhood, but rather a complete machine into which their users can plug hours upon hours of time into. Mobage companies have recognized this as well, seeing the success Touhou Project was able to attain by using its mythological structure to create a platform of infinite interpretation, fanworks are encouraged as the lowest pieces of a vertical structure, for the purpose of getting libido inputted into the gacha game, converted into currency and power for those at the top.
The primary preoccupation of the level design of Dark Souls is in ruin, in spaces long after they’ve served their peak. The Darkroot Garden is all that remains of what was once peaceful groves surrounding the city long lost to the Abyss. Anor Londo is empty, populated only by the guardians of its few true inhabitants, whose death triggers the end of the illusory kingdoms they uphold. Izalith, New Londo, and Oolacile appear as ruins, half-sunken in chaotic forces that swallowed their glory. At the deepest levels of the map, the ruins of primordial cradles, the Tomb of Giants where death was born and struck down the first life, the giants, and the kiln of the first flame, the primordial site of origin in the birth metaphysics of the world.
At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop’s disintegration is almost orphic. He returns as a ghostly spectre, haunting the few who can see his personage in the paths they all walk, after he enclosed the mandalic mytharc of Der Raketenstadt’s birth. His self though, dissolves, at the center of the mandala of the text, into the crossroads of 0,0 on a cartesian grid. When the text loops back around, we encounter Slothrop again, a spectre showing the path of the text, the text now a landscape, a world to inhabit, to walk across by the paths he made by his first steps.
Thomas Hobbes imagined the nation as a body, as depicted on the frontispiece of Leviathan. The sovereign is the kingly head of the nation, thus being the personhood of the nation, while its body is composed of the numerous lives and existences within him. The King himself becomes far greater than even an individual possessed with powers over all, but instead becomes the apex of the state, which itself is the head of the entire corpus of the nation.
Composing the institution as a body, heraldry has this same form. Flying over the kingdom, the flag shows the kingdom composed with all its organs, with the vertical heads made to dissolve once again into the overall picture. The stability of the crown dissolves in this as the flag becomes territory, as the body of the king sinks backwards into the landscape to become the nation it once ruled over.
Hitler once made a directive to his architects to construct buildings such that they would decay gracefully. No doubt in his mind, visions abounded of the Hellenistic ruins, now sprung alive with gardens of forest over their cracked marble, the half-ruined parthenon symbolizing the ultimate glory of his thousand year reich.
In the canonical ending, the player of Dark Souls becomes one of many who answered the siren call to link the flame. Taking themselves into the fire, they disintegrate to ash as many after them will. In doing so, they fulfilled their ultimate end as men. When the father dies, his buildings erected, his cities constructed, his name remains as his bones. The masculine obsession with “legacy” is thus, the wish to fulfill the purpose of the height of manhood, to make oneself present to such intense degree, that one can finally annihilate themselves, becoming the landscape they have built, their bones becoming as everpresent as the trees or mountains.
A common example used to refute the validity of IQ tests as a measure of human worth is the rhetorical on what occurs when those raised in close proximity to nature do in response to some questions. While a more urbanite mind will organize for instance, animals, in abstract categories such as mammals vs reptiles, pets vs domestic, a ruralite will organize the same animals into concretely useful categories such as what predates on another, what begets different resources or results. The test, biased towards a particular type of bourgeois intellect, will bias towards the urbanite in respect to their greater ability to perform intellectual labor such as computation.
This issue shows the marked intellectual difference created in the discursive or mechanical structures of minds reared in different environments. The mind more insulated within human-created entities grows to a new type, a more civilized kind made by, in the lump-state of development, greater degrees of human influence.
The hyper-civilized person is blind to that which the animal-body is immediately open to. The blinding of Thomas Jerome Newton is symbolic of this, brought into cold metal where facsimiles of organic eyes are fused to blind him, making his visage plastic, the button-eyes of Lazarus. There is a different form of sight, eyes turned backwards, unable to view the things of the physical world with the depth of a primitive and instead turned to different, higher frequences of the third eye, that is accessed when this happens.
Such is symbolized in the sealed eyes turning into the station to station mystic insights. At the peak of his civilization, Thomas is transmuted into the Thin White Duke, gaining transcendent insight by being blinded to the lower things of the world. In this blinding, the closed circuit of standard animal-cognition breaks down, the whole psyche of the primitive is fractured in ways unique to those existing in the linguistic density of privilege. The standard schema of an animal, a life based around consumption and excretion, moving from one node to the next of these two, is broken, its totality shattered. The seeping in the cracks of alien forces is sometimes literal, the infamous anecdote of Bowie as the Duke detecting a gas leak at the hair salon, or the experiments proving the ability of schizophrenics to predict the weather by reading data normally hidden by the well functioning psyche.
The Thin White Duke comes into being as the neophyte of transcendence after privilege by this shattering. These cracks are formed by the circuit being unclosed or overstuffed, in ways only capable by unnatural, external forces not known to the lower animal composition of the mental circuitry, forces of intense unnaturality unreachable by those who must make normal use of their animal-circuitry for reasons of poverty. Doing so cracks open the enclosed loop and prepares the individual for not only free movement, but free construction and reconstruction, and in doing so, mystic practice.
