From Fetish to Factish and Back Again
Authors: Banks John 
Published: October 2020

Introduction

This essay is very much an anxious response to an earlier article, "Controlling Gameplay", that I wrote for M/C about gameplay: the immersive, visceral experience of playing computer and video games. I argued that gameplay concerns the event status of playing computer and video games, and that as such it exceeds the symbolic content of games. Now, I continue to be troubled by the implications of this assertion -- does it not give up too much ground gained by the understanding that social practices such as gaming are socially constructed? Does it not return us to all of the problems associated with claims of access to an essential, authentic experience? In short, it becomes very difficult to contest or question such claims. The term gameplay may well function to depoliticise computer gaming; at least if the domain of the properly sociopolitical is understood as the symbolic field! -- and perhaps we shouldn't concede this point too quickly. In the previous article did I almost against myself end up fetishising the technological through the postulation of this sublime experience?
The Fetish & Desire
You may well be wondering what any of this has got to do with desire. Well, first let me fill you in on the research context out of which these essays emerge. For the past three years I have been undertaking ethnographic research on computer gaming: first, by participating in online gamer fan activities; and second, in an enterprise ethnographic study of Auran, a computer game development company situated in Brisbane, Australia. "Controlling Gameplay" is clearly marked by my immersion and entanglement in an ethnographic relationship with online gamers. The material on which it is based came from spending up to 25 hours a week online playing and discussing games. The point of these comments is not simply to establish my credentials as a gamer, nor to embarrassingly distance myself from 'going native' by making the appropriate gestures about reflexivity. Rather, I insist on these moments of fetishistic disavowal and illusion as a necessary condition of doing ethnographies. This shifts us from the domain of desire to what Slavoj Zizek, following Lacan, theorises as enjoyment.
In the introduction to "Controlling Gameplay" I made the banal point that computer game software is a commodity. Computer games offer an example of the informational commodity circulating through the networks of informational capitalism. This is basically the bottom line of gaming: big business. Zizek carefully outlines that central to the Marxist understanding of commodity fetishism -- the displacement of relations among people onto relations among things -- is a fascination for some kind of mysterious 'content' that is presumed to be hidden by the form of commodities (Sublime Object 16-22). An example of this is the cultural studies academic doing ethnographic research, and believing that his work offers "something more", a potential critical edge, than just the commodification and corporatisation of academic work. It would appear, at least initially, that this is precisely how gameplay is working: the hidden technological sublime behind the empty form of the informational commodity. The problem for critical analysis then becomes that of insisting on asking the question of why this 'content' of gameplay is affirmed in the game's particular status of the commodity form. We are not interested in disclosing "the secret behind the form but the secret of this form itself" (Sublime Object 15).
In discussions many gamers would insist on the fact that gameplay is simply the fun factor of playing computer games: nothing more and nothing less. Others would insist on refusing to finally fill in this secret content. After describing gameplay as having something to do with an immersive experience of escapism a gamer would invariably move on to suggest that it perhaps involved the design of a good interface that allows the player to seamlessly participate in the game; or it is to do with quality game-design, a careful balancing of various features that define a particular genre. Or it is a skill developed and honed by many hours of gaming; intense gameplay is an insider's experience that is used to define your belonging as a 'hard-core gamer with cred' -- if it has to be explained and described to you, well, you just won't get it, will you?
In the movement of these discussions and exchanges desire is not so much to be found or discovered in the hidden content of an essential, authentic experience that is gameplay, but rather it is right there on the surface, in the work of these displacements. If anything then, unconscious desire is not a deep interior experience of gameplay but in the very form of this movement, in the work that is done to elaborate and produce the effect of a hidden content. And the question arises: what is being avoided or obfuscated in this movement that perhaps has nothing at all to do with an experience of gameplay or even desire for that matter? I will return to this question in a moment. The important step here is not to become overly dazzled by this 'content' of gameplay, but instead to ask the question of why it assumes the form of a commodity. But why this focus on the commodity-form, and the process of fetishistic inversion. After all there is a lot more at stake here than simply the commodity-form or some kind of economic reductionism, essentialism or substantialism. There is also the fascinating power of attraction that this "something more" can exert on academic work. This has to do with the status of a sublime materiality that persists beyond the physical materiality of an object in the networks of business, or even that of an object-cause for intersubjective desire played out in the game of ethnographic research. It is precisely this persistence that is so troubling.
But is this interest in fetishistic disavowal, the insistence on "something more", simply a more refined type of traditional ideology critique? That is, is it once more a matter of the illusory knowledge or beliefs of misguided naive gamers which the critical intellectual will come along and tear down, to reveal the true state of affairs -- that there is really nothing there except perhaps a complex, overdetermined effect of socioeconomic processes, a social construction if you like? Is all of this concern with the fetish simply an epistemological and monstrous game played out in the interiority of the thinking subject that has in fact very little, if anything, to do with the effective materiality of the complex assemblage that is computer gaming. Perhaps a shift to the materiality of the processes and objects involved in the production of computer gaming would help us to leave behind the problem of the fetish as some tired epistemological quandary about illusory belief. After all, is not the very idea of commodity fetishism based on a rather tired and limiting opposition between people and things?
The Factish
In his recent Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Bruno Latour attacks the notion of the fetish and the modern critical subject that he believes is behind it. Latour's actor-network theory (nicely explained in Sean Aylward Smith's recent article for M/C, "Where Does the Body End?") works to displace the assumed divide between subjects and objects, particularly humans and nonhumans. This is often theorised through richly detailed ethnographic studies that follow the associations between humans and nonhumans that make up the assemblages and collectivities of scientific practice and technological projects. In Pandora's Hope Latour takes aim at the critical gesture of the iconoclast, the modern critic, who seeks to expose the fetish as "something that is nothing in itself, but simply the blank screen onto which we have projected, erroneously, our fancies, our labor, our hopes and passions". A problem for the anti-fetishist is the assumption that people naively believe in the inherent, mysterious qualities of the object in the first place. Anti-fetishism is not so much about the qualities or status of the object and our relations to it, but more a mode of argument: "it is always an accusation. Some person, or some people, are accused of being taken in -- or worse, of cynically manipulating credulous believers -- by someone who is sure of escaping from this illusion and wants to free the others as well: either from naive belief or from being manipulative. But if anti-fetishism is clearly an accusation, it is not a description of what happens with those who believe or are manipulated" (270).
Latour argues that the problem of fetishism is all in the mind of the critical thinker. Believing himself disconnected from the realm of things and objects, this monstrous "mind in the vat" "invents the notion of belief and manipulation and projects this notion upon a situation in which the fetish plays an entirely different role" (270). Latour proposes that we shift our attention to the status of the fetish as a quasi-object or factish. The factish has to be fabricated, made, and invented; as such it has a complex and variable ontology in which it is entangled within collective practice. The status of the factish is all about the associations between humans and nonhumans and refuses the disabling opposition between subject and object, epistemology and ontology, internal belief and external world. The modern critic's belief that others believe functions to render invisible the complicated practice through which the categories are mixed and factishes are constructed. To replace all of this Latour suggests that we adopt a heterogeneous ontology in which we externalise belief "among the multiplicity of nonhumans" (284) -- in short that we recognise the ontological content of beliefs, and grant ontology back to nonhuman entities (273-88).
By taking up the approach of actor-network theory I could now follow the diverse actors, both human and nonhuman, that make up the network and practices of computer gaming. When the gamers assert that gameplay is this and that and so on, I can take them at their word. They are not telling me, in some hysterical cycle, 'no it's not that, no, not that'. But instead 'yes it is that, and that as well'. They are affirming the multiple and heterogeneous ontology of humans and nonhumans. So I took this toolbox of concepts with me into my fieldwork encounters and interventions at Auran. And not surprisingly it worked really well.
I could now quite easily and comfortably follow the entangled materiality of humans and nonhumans; the multiple shifting ontologies of objects such as game engines that function as representations in design reports; key elements in long term corporate business plans; links in relations with other corporations; development tools for game designers; the focus of licensing agreements; and programming problems and challenges for programmers. Game designers, programmers, CEOs, and public relations officers were more than happy to describe and show me the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans involved in producing computer games. Now, throughout the period of my fieldwork I have been quite anxious and worried about negotiating the conditions of access, about the control exercised by senior Auran management. But at each stage or period of my research I have been amazed by the level of cooperation and access that has been given to me. Nor has Auran management shown much concern about my access to 'problem areas' of the company as it went through various periods of restructuring. I have had open and what I believe to be frank discussions with disgruntled employees who were very uncomfortable and openly critical of various aspects of Auran. And there has been very little effort to control or restrict my use of this material. My impression is that Auran has been more than pleased to put on display for the dazzled gaze of the ethnographer the corporate processes and mechanisms involved in producing computer game software. Initially I was rubbing my hands with glee at this research opportunity. I can see publication potential and career opportunities emerging from this ethnographic entanglement with Auran.
The Fetish and Enjoyment
But I have become increasingly anxious and worried about how well the fieldwork at Auran has gone, and how well actor-network theory works in explaining the multiple and heterogeneous ontologies of the humans and nonhumans that I have been mixing with for the past two years. And this worry brings me back to the fetish. I think Latour is correct: belief is not something internal, but more a matter of practice, externalised in the relations among humans and nonhumans. But is this not precisely the more useful and correct definition of the fetish, at least under the conditions of informational capitalism? Far from moving us out of the domain of the fetish into the ontological materiality of the factish, Latour is perhaps describing the fetishistic inversion perfectly. It is not at the level of some kind of internal knowledge, belief or deep mysterious unconscious that the misrecognition of the fetishistic inversion takes place. Rather, it is at the properly social level of our acts, what we do, that we overlook the fetishistic 'repressed' social dimension (Sublime Object 20). This nonknowledge of reality is part of the very effectivity of our social acts, "a kind of reality which is possible only on condition that the individuals partaking in it are not aware of its proper logic; that is, a kind of reality whose very ontological consistency implies a certain non-knowledge of its participants" (Sublime Object 21).
The further point to recognise, as Zizek points out, is that commodity fetishism is not just the replacement of people with things, or our overlooking the properly social relations between humans behind things. More importantly, it is that this misrecognition occurs precisely at the level of the network of relations among things -- what is a structural effect of this network of relations starts to appear as the immediate property of one of the elements (Sublime Object 23-4). So from all of this the important point for my purposes is that fetishism is not really about what people know. Of course gamers know very well that their software is a commodity, and that capitalist business interests are basically running the show: they talk about the business of gaming all the time. The point is rather the fact that the fetishistic inversion occurs in the very activity of playing. This misrecognition, or illusion if you will, is not about false knowledge: the illusion is structuring reality, our real social activity: "they know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know" (Sublime Object 32). So Latour is quite insightful, belief is radically exterior and as Zizek points out one of the uptakes of this is that things, commodities, end up believing for us -- "it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people" (34).
But does not Latour's focus on the complex ontology of objects, and our entanglement with them, at least in some way work to challenge this fetishistic inversion? Is not this obfuscation of the process of production, even if we shift that misrecognition to the relations among things, questioned by the process of exposing or opening the black box of the production mechanism? After all, isn't this precisely what we are trying to do with ethnographies? The difficulty, as Zizek writes in "Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes", is that "far from destroying the 'fetishist' illusion, the insight into the production mechanism in fact even strengthens it". It is the disclosure of the production process itself that "serves as the fetish which fascinates with its presence". And what is being concealed, and persists through all this display of disclosure is "the social mode of production" (102). Zizek warns us "the transparency of the process of production is false in so far as it obfuscates the immaterial virtual order which effectively runs the show ... . Capital functions as the sublime irrepresentable Thing, present only in its effects, in contrast to a commodity, a particular material object which miraculously 'comes to life', starts to move as if endowed with an invisible spirit" (103).
Time for me to get back to the question of desire. One of the more fascinating and disturbing uptakes of this approach to the fetish is that the fetishistic misrecognition persists and insists beyond any interpretative intervention. This is the necessary conclusion of the fact that fetishism is not about what we know, but what we do: 'I know all too well that computer games are informational commodities generating profits for capitalist enterprises, but damn, they are fun to play.' The problem with gameplay is not one of explaining it, symbolising it, or even finding the appropriate theoretical vocabulary in which to talk about it. Gamers have come up with a range of different and flexible ways of discussing (dare I say, quite reflexively) the experience of gameplay. The problem is that I can never quite get rid of this problem of gameplay, it insists on sticking and attaching itself to my ethnography.
Bruno Latour picks up on this dilemma with the observation that despite all the best efforts of the anti-fetishist critic "somehow the fetish gains in strength ... . The more you want it to be nothing, the more action springs back from it" (270). Even the attempt to generate a kind of critical distance through the process of 'writing up' the dissertation is smeared with the rather disgusting, perverted Enjoyment taken in disclosing and robbing the other of their Enjoyment. It is as if we are compelled, interpellated, by an anonymous superegoic injunction to 'Enjoy our gaming'. As Slavoj Zizek argues in his recent work (including the magnificent The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology) the order of capital no longer functions according to the matrix of desire, a prohibitive injunction that sets in motion the impossibility of satisfying desire that is "reflexively inverted into the desire for nonsatisfaction" (345). Instead we get a corporate "little brother" commanding us to Enjoy ourselves! (The Ticklish Subject 347) Perhaps the only response open to us in these circumstances is in the act of insisting on a bottom line: $.

References

Banks, John. "Controlling Gameplay." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). 22 July 1999 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/game.php>.
Latour, Bruno. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999.
Smith, Sean Aylward. "Where Does the Body End?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). 22 July 1999 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/end.php>.
Zizek, Slavoj. "Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes." The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. 86-126.
---. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
---. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

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