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This vacillation on the semblances of the Real within the pseudo-symbolic order of eRepublik was provided to The Roar of the Lion by Delmar Abdulmeningitis, an old friend of PQ's from Chicago. Delmar reports that PQ is enjoying his vacation from the Game by re-examining his long-running critique of vulgar Hegelianism after having read parts of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations while under the influence of Chai Latte. The following notes summarize recent jolly conversations that Delmar had with PQ regarding the contours of possibilities for the emancipatory project in our lifetime.







Tractacus e-Logico-Philosophicus

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein



A superfluous prohibition prohibits something which is already in itself impossible. This paradox faithfully reproduces the problematic situation regarding aesthetic representations of eRepublik: it shouldn't be done, because it can't be done.

Those e-martyrs who have punctiliously suffered the unremitting boredom of the Game would likely argue that there can be no novel about eRepublik: any text claiming to be such is either not about eRepublik or is not a novel. Phoenix Quinn's years-long existential hangover tinged with Cuban-flavored New Orleans-style Hallelujah blues plays a crucial role in his reversal of this prohibition: for Quinn, it is not poetic fiction but prosaic documentary which is impossible after the jillion million scads of catastrophic fail toted up in the name of the Game.

Rejecting this claim that literature and eRepublik are incommensurable, Quinn has argued -- occasionally at great length -- that the Game can only be represented by the arts. It is not the aestheticization of the Game which is false, but its reduction to being the object of documentary reports. Every attempt to "reproduce the facts" in a documentary way neutralizes the traumatic impact of e-events -- or as other popular secular spiritualist blues fans have put it: truth has the structure of fiction.

When truth is too traumatic to be confronted directly, it can only be accepted in the guise of fiction. As Bill Galaxia once posted on an inter-spacial red thread that he transmitted during a long trip to rendezvous with a certain seller of rare hot blue venison somewhere in Hoag's Object, if by chance he were to stumble across a feature-length Youtube documentary showing the actual history of eRepublik, he would hack it immediately. Such a documentary would be obscene, disrespectful towards the victims gamers even. When considered in this way, the pleasure of aesthetic fiction is not a simple form of escapism, but a mode of coping with a traumatic memory -- it is an e-survival mechanism.






But how to avoid the danger that the aesthetic pleasure generated by fiction will obliterate the proper trauma engendered by the Game? Only a minimal aesthetic sensibility is needed to recognize that there would be something false about an epic novel on eRepublic, written in the grand style of 19th century psychological realism: such novels belong to the historical epoch that preceded eRepublik.

It is not unlike the difficult task of depicting the atmosphere of terror engendered by a totalizing regime that aims at creating "a new man". Imagine you are a Mother living during the peak of a period of political purges, in a country where only propaganda is "truth" but the police state is very very real. You wait in a long queue outside a prison, day after day, during the coldest days of the coldest winter on record, to learn the fate of your son.

One day somebody in the crowd identifies you as a writer. A young woman, lips blue from the cold, her visage ravaged by trauma, had of course never heard you called by your name before. But now she is briefly started out of the torpor engulfing everyone and asks you, in a whisper (everyone whispers there): "Can you describe this?"

Perhaps you had the courage to say, "I can." If so, you would've seen something like a smile pass fleetingly over what had once been a beautiful face.






What kind of description is that? Surely not a realistic description of the situation, but one which extracts from the confused reality its own inner form. At this level, truth is no longer something that depends on the faithful reproduction of facts.

What makes a report of trauma truthful is its very factual unrealiability, confusion, inconsistency. If victims were able to report on their painful and humiliating experiences in a clear way, with all the data neatly arranged, this very quality would make us suspicious.

The problem here is part of the solution: the very deficiencies of the traumatized player's report on the facts bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content has contaminated the very form in which it is reported.






What we are dealing with here is, of course, the gap between the enunciated content and the subjective position of enunciation. The medium here is not the message, quite the opposite: the very medium that we use -- the universal inter-subjectivity of language -- undermines the message.

It is the problem of the solipsist trying to convince others that he alone really exists.

There is a similar catch in preaching tolerance: it (presup)poses its presupposition -- that is, the subject deeply "bothered" by the Neighbor -- and thus only reasserts it. Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.






The aesthetic lesson of the paradox is clear. The horribleness of the Game cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself. What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion.

We can only say things about facts in the e-world; its logical form cannot be spoken about, only shown. However, what we cannot speak about can be shown, that is, directly rendered in the very form of speaking. This is not a mystical statement. It is inherent in language as the form of language.

Returning to the topic of game-induced trauma: we cannot directly talk about or describe it, but the traumatic excess can nevertheless be "shown" in the distortion of our speech about the trauma, in its elliptic repetitions and other distortions.







PQ's novel unfolds during a journey in a cramped and squalid e-boxcar carrying 120 Libertad resistance fighters from a failed frontline battle to provide elections for a small country to a forum retard court organized to indict them for treason. His protaganist and narrator, Gianni Vato-Pippin, is one of the prisoners. In sudden temporal switches, Gianni's narrative lurches back and forth from the time of the Great Rebellion to two, three, sixteen years later as he looks back on these events, sometimes in anger, sometimes in wonder, sometimes at a loss for words. His fractured stream of consciousness jolts from remembering the past to imagining the future, since the experience has fragmented him into a splintered self. Multiple current flow unimpede😛 he is simultaneously a partisan, a prisoner and a survivor of the Game. By recreating Gianni's consciousness as an intersection of various time zones, PQ renders the fluid timeless ordeal of the Game inmate who has lost his sense of life as a chronological passage from yesterday through today into tomorrow.

The true focus of his story is not what really happened on the way to the trial and sentencing of the Libertad militia for treason, but how such events affect the very identity of the subject: the elementary contours of e-reality are shattered, the subject no longer experiences himself as part of a continuous flow of history which devolves from the past towards the future.

Time becomes space, giving us an uncanny freedom to move back and forth along it just as we wander around in open space, with past and future as different paths that we can take at will. The blind spot is that we can see everything but the trial itself. This prohibited present is, of course, the shadow of termination, the colonization of memory; there is in fact no way to retrieve the pleasant memory of a lover at the door without simultaneously triggering the corruption of that memory by the trauma of the sentencing gavel.





This does not, however, mean that we are irrevocably trapped in the misery of our finitude, deprived of any redemptive moments. In PQ's story, just as they are being condemned for treason and sentenced to endless trolling, two of the comrades clasp hands and jump, like Thelma and Louise did, off the cliff of the meta-game forum and remain frozen, flying over the precipice, as the story concludes.

Though it captures a vision of positive utopia, the weakness of the ending is the lack of novelistic soundtrack to record what "really" happened next, which tends to undermine the utopian vision of the frozen image.







The question I asked PQ was whether this was just another one of his desperate post-modern attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself, or has he been able to capture the Real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle?

I didn't expect him to answer me, and he didn't. So I am submitting these notes to the readers of The Roar of the Lion to ask what you think happened next.



Respectfully,
Delmar Abdulmeningitis