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Through the Looking Glass: Aisthesis and Semiosis in Computer Games

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Part of the book series: Performance Philosophy ((PPH))

Abstract

The first chapter provides the groundwork for a philosophical analysis of computer games from the perspective of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, systems theory and media theory. It deals with questions of what kind of media computer games really are, why they are significant and emblematic for the digital age and to what extent they influence our ways of perception.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Promotional text of the software developer Electronic Arts for the game Majestic. The link to the website this citation was taken from is no longer available.

  2. 2.

    The content of an ‘adventure’ video game is to solve puzzles set by gaming software in order to ‘progress’ within a story. These puzzles consist of the logical combination of information and/or virtual objects, to develop solutions which then themselves lead to further branches of the plot and thus also to new puzzles.

  3. 3.

    ‘Bots’ are intelligent programs which act according to a particular principle and, for example, write entries in Internet forums, send emails with a particular content at predetermined times, or can even communicate in real-time chats with the player. A broad presentation of these particular forms of ‘artificial intelligence ’, on the basis of numerous examples, can be found in Sherry Turkle: Leben im Netz. Identität in Zeiten des Internet, Frankfurt/M 1999.

  4. 4.

    Representative of this are the following essay collections: Florian Rötzer (ed.): Digitaler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, Frankfurt/M 1996; Sybille Krämer (ed.): MedienComputerRealität, Frankfurt/M 2000; Gianni Vattimo, Wolfgang Welsch (eds.): Medien-Welten Wirklichkeiten, Munich 1998, as well as Ars Electronica (ed.): Philosophien der neuen Technologien, Berlin 1989, and the bibliographies included within it.

  5. 5.

    Gianni Vattimo: Die Grenzen der Wirklichkeitsauflösung, in: Vattimo, Welsch (eds.): Medien-Welten…, p. 24.

  6. 6.

    Vattimo: Die Grenzen…, p. 20.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., p. 19.

  8. 8.

    The ‘Riefenstahlization’ of a certain advertisement aesthetic serves as an extreme example, which flagrantly adapts Leni Riefenstahl’s pseudoclassical monumental aesthetics of a ‘Triumph of the Will’ (Davidoff advertisement, ‘Let me see you stripped’, music video of the group Rammstein).

  9. 9.

    Vattimo: Die Grenzen…, p. 22.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., p. 22.

  11. 11.

    For example, Ulrich Raulff, writing in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung: ‘In the last four decades of its existence, the video game has found many critics, but not the criticism it is due. That must now change. In the feature section of this newspaper, video games will from now on be treated as legitimate objects of criticism, no different from books, exhibitions and CDs. A series on “new games” will be a regular criticism, in which critics of technology and aesthetics will participate, as well as anthropologists and researchers into dreams and brains. “The time has come to treat play seriously”, wrote Jacques Ehrmann in 1968. This statement is more relevant now than ever. We want to give our attention to the game’ (Accessed from http://www.sueddeutsche.de/index.php?url=/kultur/themen/25379/index.php, 3 January 2002).

  12. 12.

    Steven Poole’sTrigger Happy (London, 2000) represents one of the few attempts in the direction of a cultural—theoretical survey of the video game. The author is a specialist journalist, who inclines in large part to a more popular—theoretical apology for the video game, with the result that the theoretical approaches he draws upon in his argument are frequently referred to in simplified form.

  13. 13.

    A survey or at least a somewhat stable list of genres of interactive entertainment software on the basis of criteria beyond advertisement-strategic practices of characterization is missing. A step in the direction of a first survey was taken by Albert Brante in Brante: Virtuelle Welten, in: C. Schwender (ed.): Kursbuch Neue Medien 2000, Stuttgart, Munich 2000. However, the field of video games is limited to the following genres, which have been differentiated in the course of a now over-20-year-long history of the commercial video game in domestic use (for the following list I thank Kay Bennemann, MA Phil., in conversation): (1) ‘Thought and skill games’ (combination and logic games. Examples: Tetris and Dr. Mario); (2) ‘Jump and run’ (games bound by a rudimentary frame plot, in which the aim is to overcome obstacles, and in which deductive skills and dexterity are demanded of the player. Examples: Super Mario and Rayman); (3) ‘Adventure and role-playing games’ (narrative-orientated games in which pure dexterity-based game structures are forgone in favour of immersing the player in a virtual ‘world’ which is as believable as possible. Examples: Monkey Island and Final Fantasy); (4) ‘Action games’(the content of the game is dominated by combat with virtual enemies in the frame of fight-driven, aggressive game plots . Examples: Quake and Tekken); (5) ‘Simulations’ (by far the most expansive genre. Fundamentally, these games aim at the re-creation of complex procedures which are also to be found in ‘reality’. These might be the simulation of an economic system (examples: Sim City or Railroad Tycoon); of a vehicle (examples: Flight Simulator and Gran Turismo); or of diverse types of sport (examples: PGA Tour Golf and the Fifa series). All named genres are rarely to be found in their ‘pure form’. In the main, games are a combination of many elements of different genres, such that a clear categorization is often difficult, if not impossible, to make.

  14. 14.

    Karlheinz Barck: Anstatt eines Nachwortes, in: Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris, Stefan Richter (eds.): Aisthesis. Warhnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Leipzig 1998, p. 462.

  15. 15.

    Walter Benjamin: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Benjamin: Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, Schocken, New York 1968, p. 222.

  16. 16.

    Sybille Krämer: Was haben die Medien, der Computer und die Realität miteinander zu tun?, in: Krämer (ed.): MedienComputer…, p. 9.

  17. 17.

    Claude E. Shannon, Warren Waever: Die Mathematischen Grundlage der Informationstheorie, Munich 1976.

  18. 18.

    Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw Hill, New York 1964.

  19. 19.

    Niklas Luhmann: Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/M 1995, pp. 165–215.

  20. 20.

    Sybille Krämer, in conversation.

  21. 21.

    Konrad Ehlich: Medium Sprache, in: Forum Angewandte Linguistik. Vol. 34, Frankfurt 1998, p. 10.

  22. 22.

    Sybille Krämer: Das Medium als Spur und als Apparat, in Krämer (ed.): MedienComputer…, p. 74.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 74.

  24. 24.

    McLuhan: Understanding Media…

  25. 25.

    See Friedrich Kittler: GrammaphonFilmTypewriter, Berlin 1986.

  26. 26.

    Krämer: Das Medium…, p. 73.

  27. 27.

    When talking here and in what follows about ‘unintentionality’, this must be understood in the context of processes of signs that are characterized by arbitrariness, and thus with conventionality and intentionality. To speak in a Husserlian sense of ‘unintentionality’ would be meaningless, because intentionality represents here a non-investigable fundamental condition of every kind of directedness towards the world.

  28. 28.

    See Jack Goody, Ian Watt, Kathleen Gough: Entstehung und Folgen der Schriftkultur, Frankfurt/M 1996.

  29. 29.

    See Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto 1962.

  30. 30.

    Krämer: Das Medium…, pp. 78–79.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 79.

  32. 32.

    It is not only possible with Jacques Lacan to conceive of the unconscious as being independent of the subject. See Jacques Lacan: Seminar on the Purloined Letter, in Lacan: Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Heloise Fink and Russel Grigg (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2002–2006); otherwise, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guatarri: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, I, London 1977; summarizing—Henning Schmidgen: Das Unbewußte der Maschinen. Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan, Munich 1997; and Friedrich Kittler: The World of the SymbolicA World of the Machine, in: Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. by John Johnston, Amsterdam 1997.

  33. 33.

    Krämer: Das Medium…, pp. 80ff.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., p. 79.

  35. 35.

    Martin Heidegger: The Origin of the Work of Art, in Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge 2002, p. 31.

  36. 36.

    Krämer: Das Medium…, p. 84.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., p. 83.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., p. 85.

  39. 39.

    Martin Seel: Medien der Realität und Realität der Medien, in: Krämer (ed.): MedienComputer…, p. 255.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., p. 255.

  41. 41.

    See, for example: Jean Baudrillard: Videowelt und fraktales Subjekt, in: Ars Electronica (ed.): Philosophien…, Berlin 1989; Baudrillard: The Agony of Power, 2010; Paul Virilio: Ästhetik des Verschwindens, Berlin 1986.

  42. 42.

    Luhmann: Die Kunst…, p. 166.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., pp. 167ff.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., p. 166.

  45. 45.

    Claudio Baraldi, Giancarlo Corsi, Elena Esposito: GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt/M 1998, p. 59.

  46. 46.

    Seel: Medien der Realität…, p. 247.

  47. 47.

    Richard Powers: Plowing the Dark, 2011, p. 7.

  48. 48.

    Alan M. Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 1936.

  49. 49.

    Friedrich Kittler: History of Communication Media. CTheory, 30 July 1996. Online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=45.

  50. 50.

    Ibid.

  51. 51.

    Kittler: GrammophoneFilm…, trans. by Dorothea von Mücke, p. 102.

  52. 52.

    Friedrich Kittler: Protected Mode, in Kittler: Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. by John Johnston, Routledge 2013, p. 158.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., p. 217.

  54. 54.

    ‘Wetware’ is an ironic term indicating the human user, in relation to ‘hardware’ and ‘software’.

  55. 55.

    Friedrich Kittler: There Is No Software. CTheory. Online at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74.

  56. 56.

    Friedrich Nietzsche: On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, in Nietzsche: Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, Boston 2017, p. 62.

  57. 57.

    In what follows, after every title of a video game cited, the publisher of the respective game, and the platforms on which it was first published, will be named in parentheses.

  58. 58.

    Excerpt from the handbook of Final Fantasy X (Square/PS2): ‘Aeons [the name of the summoned creatures in this game, M.R.] are divine creatures that only answer the call of a true Summoner. Each Aeon protects its master with unique powers and characteristics. Aeons grow stronger as their summoners do.’

  59. 59.

    Excerpt from the handbook to Diablo II; description of the summoning spell ‘Clay Golem’: ‘While it is fairly simple for a Necromancer to animate dead tissue, it is another matter entirely to instill the spark of life into inanimate objects. The Clay Golem is the simplest form of this complex art, creating a servant directly from the earth to serve the Necromancer. The intense drain this places on the psyche of the caster only allows him to maintain a single Golem of any type at a time. Effect: Raises a Golem from the earth to fight for you.’

  60. 60.

    A particularly elaborate form of these virtual creatures is represented by those creatures that play a key role in Black & White (Electronic Arts/PC). In this game, the player may choose from a selection of creatures resembling enormous tigers, tortoises or apes, and which can be raised by the player like virtual pets. Worth mentioning here is the extremely sophisticated ‘artificial intelligence ’ (AI) of these creatures, which are no longer directed by the player but, rather, react independently of the behaviour of the player, in accordance with complex algorithms. It is noticeable how life-like these creatures can appear. They are not simply virtual recipients of orders, but behave (seemingly) according to their own whims and can also act against the player’s attempts to train them (which is, in practice, more the rule than the exception).

  61. 61.

    An exception here is formed only by certain areas of the simulation genre, like sports games or vehicle simulations. The subjects of the diverse forms of adventure, role play, action games or jump and runs can be relegated almost entirely to the field of fantasy, even if it is frequently in a very simplified form.

  62. 62.

    Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford 2002, p. 28.

  63. 63.

    Gershom Scholen: The Idea of the Golem.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., p. 219.

  65. 65.

    Scholem: The Idea of the Golem, p. 212.

  66. 66.

    An idea whose perhaps most subtle form Walter Benjamin worked out in his conception of ‘Sprachmagie’. See: Walter Benjamin: On Language Itself and on the Language of Man, in Bullock, Jennings (eds.): Selected Writings, Vol. 1, Cambridge, MA and London 1996; and Winfried Menninghaus: Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie, Frankfurt/M 1995.

  67. 67.

    Umberto Eco: Mirrors, in: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana UP 1984, p. 212.

  68. 68.

    Mennighaus: Walter Benjamins…, p. 17.

  69. 69.

    Kittler: There Is No… Independently of Kittler, Jay David Bolter arrived at the same result, this time on the example of graphic user interfaces: ‘Electronic icons realize what magic signs in the past could only suggest, for electronic icons are functioning representations in computer writing.’ In Jay David Bolter: Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, Hillsdale, NJ/London 1991, p. 26.

  70. 70.

    See Sect. 1.2.

  71. 71.

    Jacques Lacan: ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, trans. by Alan Sheridan.

  72. 72.

    Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass: And What Alice Found There.

  73. 73.

    Sigmund Freud: Studies on Hysteria (together with Josef Breuer), trans. by Strachey and others, 1895, p. 110.

  74. 74.

    And indeed, Lewis Carroll’s Alice completes the entry through the looking-glass of digital images within the game Alice introduced earlier. The game is an adaptation of Carroll’s material, as the player accompanies Alice through a nightmare version of Wonderland.

  75. 75.

    Mike Sandbothe: Transversale Medienwelten. Philosophische Überlegungen zum Internet, in: Gianni Vattimo, Wolfgang Welsch (eds.): MedienWeltenWirklichkeiten, Munich 1998, p. 74.

  76. 76.

    Sandbothe: Transversale…, pp. 75–76.

  77. 77.

    I borrow the term ‘oculocentrism’, which describes the supremacy of sight over all other senses within Western culture , within a Derridean jargon: Ales Erjavec: Das fällt ins Auge…, in: Vaittimo, Welsch (eds.): Medien Welten…, pp. 39–59.

  78. 78.

    It is worth emphasizing here that the privilege of seeing as a fundamental metaphor of all true recognition for Plato accompanies an aggressive resistance towards all that is imagistic-sensual. Seeing is uncoupled from the seen, the image, and is thus deprived of sense. Jacques Derrida goes so far as to claim that Western philosophy has only constituted itself as such in order to resist the powers of the image and not to give in to the image’s unsettling effect. See: Jacques Derrida: The Work of Mourning, Chicago 2003, p. 35.

  79. 79.

    Hans Jonas: Das Prinzip Leben. Ansätze zu einer philosophischen Biologie, Frankfurt/M. 1994, p. 235. Considered exactly, tendencies of the Platonic philosophy are thus described. Within the pre-Socratic philosophy, the prevalence of seeing is not yet recorded. See, on this, Martin Heidegger: ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track, Frankfurt/M. 1994, pp. 90ff.

  80. 80.

    Erjavec: Das fällt ins…, p. 40.

  81. 81.

    See Erwin Panofsky, ‘die Perspektive als “symbolische Form”, in Panofsky: Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed by H. Oberer and E. Verheyen, Berlin 1992.

  82. 82.

    Sybille Krämer: Zentralperspektive, Kalkül, Virtuelle Realität, in: Vattimo, Welsch (eds.): MedienWelten…, p. 31.

  83. 83.

    Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 31.

  84. 84.

    See: Erjavec: Das fällt ins…, pp. 45ff. In his representation, Erjavec refers to Martin Jay’s observations in Martin Jay: Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Berkeley 1994.

  85. 85.

    Jean Baudrillard: The Agony of Power, 2010.

  86. 86.

    Jacques Lacan: Seminar I: Freud’s Technical Papers, Cambridge 1988.

  87. 87.

    Lacan: The Mirror Stage, p. 204.

  88. 88.

    At this point it can only be indicated that an aporia emerges within the cited theory formations, in that these approaches of image hostility perpetuate a concept which, as has been shown, is a constituent of Western metaphysics from Plato to Descartes, thus exactly the tradition of thought that many ‘post-structuralists’ (with the exception of Lacan) hoped to overcome in relation to Nietzsche and Heidegger.

  89. 89.

    Erjavec: Das fällt ins…, p. 44.

  90. 90.

    Jean Baudrillard: ‘The Vanishing Point of Communication’, in David Clarke and others (eds.): Baudrillard: Fatal Theories, Routledge 2008.

  91. 91.

    Baudrillard: ‘The Vanishing Point…’, p. 12.

  92. 92.

    Vilém Flusser: Into the Universe of Technical Images, Minnesota 2011.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., p. 10. This statement, which sounds peculiar when cited in isolation, that the ‘hallucinatory power’, which has ‘technical images ’ to thank for its existence, according to Flusser, and which is the result of a historical process causing a loss of ‘faith in rules’, represents the Flusserian formulation of the phenomenon of the ‘dissolution of reality ’, which was mentioned earlier in this work.

  94. 94.

    See also Paul Virilio’s analyses of the ‘paradoxical logic of the image’ in the age of digitization : Paul Virilio: The Vision Machine, Indiana 1994, p. 156.

  95. 95.

    Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 33.

  96. 96.

    Umberto Eco: Mirrors, in: Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana UP 1984.

  97. 97.

    Ibid., p. 77.

  98. 98.

    The book depicted is Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym. Of course, the mantelpiece and the book serve to make the mirror within the image recognizable as such, and not, for example, as a window.

  99. 99.

    Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 32.

  100. 100.

    Ibid., p. 32.

  101. 101.

    The phenomenon of the so-called ‘Fata Morgana’ belongs equally to this phenomenon complex.

  102. 102.

    See Jacques Lacan: What Is a Picture?, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.): The Visual Culture Reader, London 2001.

  103. 103.

    The game content of Tomb Raider consists in the situation that the player must orientate him/herself in a complexly constructed virtual landscape and locate the respective level’s exit each time. For this, mostly acrobatic climbs are necessary.

  104. 104.

    Game dialogue in the game Metal Gear Solid (Konami/Playstation).

  105. 105.

    See Gilles Deleuze: The Logic of Sense, Columbia UP 1990.

  106. 106.

    Dietrich Schwanitz: Systemtheorie und Literatur. Ein neues Paradigm, Opladen 1990, p. 13.

  107. 107.

    Carroll: Alice…, p. 34.

  108. 108.

    The narrative content of the game revolves around a conspiracy the hero of the game must defeat by means of infiltrating the headquarters of a terrorist group. The actors all have code names which, with their common history as ‘top agents’ are involved with a secret government Task Force.

  109. 109.

    Suikoden is the name of a role-play game by the developer Konami.

  110. 110.

    Implied here is the real hardware interface of the game console Playstation, the “Dual Shock Pad”, which by means of in-built motors can make the ‘controller’ vibrate with various degrees of intensity. This is a notable immersion technique, known among other things as ‘force feedback’, which enables a haptic connection to the action on the screen via a real hardware interface.

  111. 111.

    Gregory Bateson: A Theory of Play and Fantasy, in: Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago 1972.

  112. 112.

    Bateson: A Theory, p. 185.

  113. 113.

    Ibid., p. 185 [my italics, M.R.].

  114. 114.

    Karl Heinz Bohrer has proposed, at length, the important role played by the moment of suddenness as an expression and sign of the discontinuity and non-identity of modern aesthetics. See Bohrer: Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, trans. by Ruth Crowley, New York 1994. It would be interesting to correlate the ‘ludic society’, much invoked in the context of the digital age , with the context he describes of the ‘concept of suddenness’ in aesthetic modernity.

  115. 115.

    ‘Mediating’ is understood here, of course, not in the sense of a synthesizing process. The medium as ‘mediator’ describes—as mentioned earlier—is first nothing more than a place that can only be defined in relation to that of which it is a mediator.

  116. 116.

    Bateson: A Theory…, p. 190.

  117. 117.

    ‘Sense’ should be understood here in Luhmann’s terms, where, ‘sense’ is itself a medium whose characteristic it is to enable self-referentiality and complexity along the differentiation of real/possible or current/potential social and psychical systems. ‘Sense’ is a base fundamental prerequisite for complex systems. See Claudio Baraldi, Giancarlo Corsi, Elena Esposito (eds.): GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt/M 1998, pp. 170ff.

  118. 118.

    Bateson: A Theory…, pp. 184–185.

  119. 119.

    Ibid., p. 185.

  120. 120.

    This type of procession of paradoxes is in Luhmann’s theory formation further carried out and more closely described with the help of George Spence-Browns thought figure of ‘re-entry’. Even for Luhmann, the paradox is not a form to be avoided if possible, but rather represents, in contrast, an integral constituent of psychic and social systems. ‘Re-entry’ designates that entry through which a system can reintegrate into itself the basal differentiation on which it is itself based in the train of self-observation. In the medium of the game, which is based on the differentiation between the real and the dictional (“Is this play?”), precisely this difference is thematised and in recourse to time.

  121. 121.

    Game dialogue after ‘clicking’ on a virtual well in Final Fantasy I (Square/SNES).

  122. 122.

    Steven Poole: Trigger Happy. The Inner Life of Videogames, London 2000, p. 77.

  123. 123.

    Krämer: Zentralperspective…, p. 36.

  124. 124.

    NPC = non-player character. Characters which populate the streets of cyber cities as virtual extras and simulate ‘life’ by means of generally very limited, automatically running animation loops.

  125. 125.

    Krämer: Zentralperspektive…, p. 36.

  126. 126.

    Powers: Plowing the Dark, p. 110.

  127. 127.

    Achim Bühl: CyberSociety. Mythos und Realität der Informationsgesellschaft, Cologne 1996, p. 54.

  128. 128.

    Ibid., p. 62.

  129. 129.

    Ibid., p. 70.

  130. 130.

    Stanislaw Lem: Summa technologiae, p. 191 [https://issuu.com/cristinobogado/docs/lem-stanislaw-summa-technologiae].

  131. 131.

    Bühl: CyberSociety…, p. 53.

  132. 132.

    Ibid., p. 58.

  133. 133.

    Ibid., p. 58.

  134. 134.

    Ibid., p. 61.

  135. 135.

    Cf. Sect. 1.4 in this work.

  136. 136.

    Bühl: CyberSociety…, pp. 57–61.

  137. 137.

    HMD = head mounted display.

  138. 138.

    Poole: Trigger Happy…, pp. 179–180.

  139. 139.

    Ibid., p. 180.

  140. 140.

    Ibid., pp. 181–182.

  141. 141.

    Ibid., p. 180.

  142. 142.

    Ibid., p. 183.

  143. 143.

    Virilio: Aesthetics, p. 9 [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7LGkCFPsv6SYTk4ZmIyYmQtN2RkZS00OWI5LWI1NWUtY2QwMDMwMTNkNmE4/view].

  144. 144.

    Virilio: Aesthetics…, p. 14.

  145. 145.

    See Elena Esposito: Fiktion und Realität, in: Krämer (ed.): MedienComputer…, pp. 269–297.

  146. 146.

    Derrick de Kerckhove: Brauchen wir, in einer Realität wie der unseren, noch Fiktionen?, in: Vattimo, Welsch (eds.): MedienWelten…, pp. 187–201.

  147. 147.

    See Georg Lukács: The Destruction of Reason, Vols. I to III, trans. by Peter R. Palmer, 1980. Lukács uses the concept of the irrational within a strictly Marxist perspective to describe intellectual tendencies which, according to his argument, can be made responsible, in a direct causal relationship, for the crimes of Fascism and National Socialism. The result is, despite many important insights into the historical relations, an ultimately hugely oversimplified depiction which does not shy away from indiscriminately excommunicating the most disparate approaches, from Romanticism to Nietzsche, Dilthey and Bergson, to NS apologists such as Baeumler or Rosenberg, to irrationalism—which he compares to the ultima ratio of historical materialism. This attempt at a philosophical—historical ‘tabula rasa’ has encountered firm resistance in Adorno, as is well known (see Theodor W. Adorno: Erpreßte Versöhnung, in Adorno: Noten zur Literatur, Frankfurt/M 1998), and today, within scholarship on Fascism, it has become obsolete, at least in this apodictic variant. What remains, however, is the use of the adjective ‘irrational’ as a pejorative word which is used by all ideological camps in the same diffuse manner and always with the intention of defamation.

  148. 148.

    Umberto Eco: Interpretation and History, in: Interpretation and Overinterpretation, pp. 26–27 [https://books.google.de/books?id=wbhROmD3guQC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=umberto+eco+unreasonableness+moderateness&source=bl&ots=LQQXWjFEP5&sig=FdDt-0e5YatPT_iwDa9lgYgrO-0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz9tHC2q7VAhVHBBoKHdBrA6sQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=umberto%20eco%20unreasonableness%20moderateness&f=false].

  149. 149.

    Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, 2011, p. 30.

  150. 150.

    Turkle, Life on the Screen…, p. 30.

  151. 151.

    McLuhan, Understanding Media…, p. 51 [http://robynbacken.com/text/nw_research.pdf].

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Rautzenberg, M. (2020). Through the Looking Glass: Aisthesis and Semiosis in Computer Games. In: Framing Uncertainty. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59521-8_1

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