Studies

A Brutal Interior | Fugue in Void

There is perhaps no more cliché assertion than to declare that we have lived through the apocalypse.

More than that, it’s an almost meaningless assertion, taken on its own. So varied are our multitudes of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic imaginaries that the end of the world amounts to little more than a vague gesture to an irreversible loss: what exactly is lost varies in every account. In the doomsday cult of postwar philosophy, the post-apocalypse sometimes takes the form of an affect, a societal sensation that something has gone wrong. Slavoj Žižek writes that we are between two deaths, that the intolerable historical traumas of the Holocaust and the Gulag have left us longing for the second, complete apocalypse, the final disruption and annihilation of the symbolic order. In the subversion of the symbolic, Julia Kristeva sees a vision of Revolution rather than apocalypse: a more egalitarian world where our status as coherent subjects is ruptured, where human beings are not static categories but dynamic processes who will “set ablaze all laws” and be truly free. Jean Baudrillard, on the other hand, speaks with bullheaded certitude that we cannot turn back from stasis, that all that remains for humanity is cancerous accumulation accompanied by amnesiac boredom.

The terror of Fugue in Void is that it imagines each of these scenarios in a state of superimposition, where our desire for the radical death of meaning is contained and controlled as capital metastasizes around us.

“This is a story of my mind”

Fugue in Void’s post-apocalyptic turn takes place in its last scene, which concludes the game’s series of incongruous architectural vignettes. In its final moments, the game places the player in a small studio apartment, in a chair nestled in the far corner from the room’s front door. A red dome, which formerly concealed the player’s gaze, lifts itself upward, revealing a series of photographs hung from a string near the ceiling. These photos are of the places the player visited over the course of the game and apart from a potted plant near the door, these photos are the only markers of personalization. They are mementos of mental voyages that in the cramped space of the apartment feel like objects of nostalgia and yearning, spaces seen only in dreams. This scene of awakening provides context for the sentence which opens the game: “This is a story of my mind.” This sentence, which appears at first to be an autobiographical assertion from developer Moshe Linke, becomes something more literal in Fugue in Void’s final moments. The game’s inscrutable imagery is not simply a privileged view into the subconscious of its auteur, rather, that imagery is given, in this final scene, a coherent narrative context as the brain imagery of a diegetic character, and it is from this minimal fiction that Fugue in Void begins to dismiss its less interesting questions, and its illegible architecture and landscapes begin to bear something like meaning.

If the mind in question is not Moshe Linke’s then whose mind is it? It is the mind of a person living in a small apartment, a person living in the dystopian future that has been foretold by science-fiction authors and academic theorists the world over. When the player steps out the apartment in Fugue in Void, they step out onto a balcony which looks out over a skyline of megalithic skyscrapers shrouded in a thick smog that conceals the ground and the precise shape of distant buildings. Piercing the opaque veil is a neon kanji on the side of an adjacent building: if it wasn’t clear already, the globalized mega-industry and soulless superstructures of Blade Runner – and its sequel, 2049, moreso – seem to be the aesthetic referents for Fugue in Void’s vision of the capitalist post-apocalypse.

“It records, rather, the neurochemical event of seeing, the pattern of the brain of the person seeing, or dreaming”

However, Fugue in Void’s truly apocalyptic character is contained not within this skyline but back in the apartment, in the chair and its red dome. This chair, this device, is the medium through which the player bears witness to the images conjured by the player-character’s mind. Fugue in Void takes Gilles Deleuze’s proclamation that “The Brain is the Screen” as literally as Patricia Pisters does, and as such the game serves as an exemplar of what Pisters calls the neuro-image (in her straightforwardly titled book The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture). The neuro-image is a symptom and aesthetic mode of contemporary media culture, in which screens become “machines of the invisible.” In neuro-images, we as audience members move “literally into the minds of our characters, into the realm of the chaotic virtual, in which we are shown often directly and without warning the inner world of our brains.”

The neuro-image is not uncommon in pop culture and is perhaps particularly prevalent in videogames. Ether One, The Evil Within, and Observer all imagine the mind as a chaotic, virtual, spatial experience, and each envisions a separate apparatus that facilitates the exploration of the mind. In all but the latter, the apparatus resembles that of Fugue in Void: a chair and an enclosure. But the memory machine of Ether One and the nightmare machine of The Evil Within still feel like distinct mechanisms, archeological tools of an altogether different mental world. The chair in the corner of Fugue in Void is in conversation with the indifferent towers that surround it. They speak the same name at different volumes. The looming structures outside bellow, while the chair and its red dome whisper of the end of the world.

Beneath its alien radiance lies raw concrete

In his book After the End: Representations of the Post-Apocalypse, James Berger uses Wim Wenders’ 1991 film Until the End of the World as a case study in the relationship between historical trauma and the contradictions of the symbolic order in the context of the post-apocalyptic sensibility of the late twentieth century. A key component of Wenders’ film is a new camera, invented by (and stolen from) the United States Government. This camera, Berger writes, “does not record optical images. It records, rather, the neurochemical event of seeing, the pattern of the brain of the person seeing, or dreaming. By bypassing “mediation or representation” the camera “overcomes all questions of epistemology, point of view, description, and memory.” In Berger’s estimation, by bypassing mediation and giving its user access to that which precedes the symbolic, this camera becomes an apocalyptic technology. The conscious and the unconscious, the self and desire, are united. This unity brings an end to discourse, to the social order that emanates from the originary alienation of the Subject. The semiotic, the Real, whatever you call what comes before language and thought, is suddenly accessible; as a result, the linguistic systems (and systems of thought) which allow us to conceive of the “world” at all are shattered. Edgar Morin writes that what is at stake in death is not “material annihilation” but the “individual as subject,” ie the self constituted through discourse. Just so with the death of the world: what is at stake for Berger is not the obliteration of the material earth, but the end of the conceptual “world” as we think of it.

Fugue in Void’s chair seems to be a new iteration of this apocalyptic camera, as it reaches for the apocalyptic unity Berger describes through the contradictions of Brutalist architecture, its ethos of immediacy and its contemporary alienated reception, which synthesize into a vision of the neurological space. Fugue in Void’s interest in contradiction is evident from its first playable scene, in which the player crosses a thin bridge over a vast body of water. Looking out towards the horizon, the bridge glows in a brilliant white hue, reflecting a mysterious light source from above. Looking out at the receding lines of the bridge, the structure seems to lack texture, in the most literal, videogame sense; the structure appears to be that kind of matter-less form particular to computer renderings. This bridge seems ideal rather than material, revolting against any notion of physicality.

This perception of this bridge shattered if one merely looks down. Absent of the overhead light source (apparently obstructed by the player-character’s unseen body), the structure unveils its simulacral materiality, the lack of light unveiling the mottled imperfection of béton brut: beneath its alien radiance lies raw concrete. This bridge exists at the intersection of the tangible and the intangible, the legible and the illegible, and it is at this intersection that the rest of Fugue in Void’s dream machine will situate itself.

The notion of legibility is central to the Brutalist mode, appearing in the form of Reyner Banham’s concept of “imageability,” which “requires that the building should be an immediately apprehensible visual entity; and that the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed by the experience of the building in use.” Imageability is fundamental to Brutalism’s social ethic, the drive to create structures which serve as active agents in sociopolitical organization, placing residents into total environments which refuse abstract concepts in favor of “images that can carry the mass of tradition and association, or the energy of novelty and technology.” This ethic does not survive Brutalism’s transposition into the realm of the chaotic mental – Fugue in Void does nothing but embrace abstraction – but it does survive as a method, or as a thematic support. Anthony Vidler expands on the above quote of Banham’s explaining that the “image” that Banham refers to is “not only a passive symbol of everyday life or technological desire, but an active participant in the viewer’s sensory perception – using all the techniques of modernist disruption, of shock and displacement, to embed its effects in experience.”

Fugue in Void reimagines the cocoon of Brutalism as an apocalyptic desire

Fugue in Void takes this formula – vernacular through shock, order through disruption – and displaces its social endgame into the psychoanalytic. The player experiences its impassive monoliths as sublime abstractions, constructions of incomprehensible scale and purpose. Rooms mirror themselves, hallways loop back in on themselves in ways that actively frustrate one’s ability to locate one’s relative position within the space. Simon Henley writes of Denys Lasdun’s iconic Brutalist National Theater that one does not understand the building but “encounter it, much like a feature in a landscape.” Fugue in Void directly suggests such an experience, with sculptures and edifices which emerge from dunes in a way that suggests that the buildings themselves predate the natural landscape which surrounds them. The imbuement of the game’s architecture with the sensation of eternity – what Louis Kahn calls Monumentality – is the consequence of the game’s separation of social intentionality from modernist abstraction. However, this separation articulated by Fugue in Void is not a radical break from actually-existing Brutalism but rather reveals the nascent potential of abstraction that (to most eyes) seems inherent to it. Henley writes that the school at Hunstanton was photographed upon its completion without furniture or people, and that this emptiness emphasizes the building’s raw materials – its “steelwork, brickwork, concrete, and glass.” More than that, though, the emptiness of the photographs emphasizes the raw geometry: the complex interrelationship of lines and tones that create the spatial unity of the total environment. Abstraction lies dormant in the socially useful space – as much is evident in the photography of Robbert Flick’s Arena Series, which transforms an empty car garage – the Brutalist space perhaps most normalized in the West – and tears it into a complex interplay of geometry articulated through exposed metal and Flick’s eye for chiaroscuro. Fugue in Void, communicates the effect of such a transformative eye through its own architecture, using its own intersections of light, shadow, and color and the shock of its architecture’s unintelligibility to communicate the immediacy of the shattering of the symbolic. Becoming a neuro-image, Brutalist immediacy becomes pre-symbolic immediacy. Fugue in Void bestows to us an image of mental process, and therefore infinity of meaning that is nigh indistinguishable from meaninglessness.

Brutalism, according to Henley, fulfilled a need in postwar Europe. Confronted with the frailty of buildings in the face of bombs, monolithic concrete provided the promise of protection from further devastation. Concrete is scar tissue, a monument to globally traumatic violence. In Fugue in Void it serves much the same function, albeit projected internally: the pictures that line the apartment suggest that Brutalism is a reaction to the outside, an escape from a world that is too far gone to save. The disruption of the symbolic occurs only at the personal level, contained within an apparatus as a temporary reprieve from the dominant social order. Fugue in Void reimagines the cocoon of Brutalism as an apocalyptic desire, a death-drive which insulates its subject from confronting the megalithic corpses that line the horizon. The chair in the corner is a coffin, a second, cleansing death on demand. It is the apocalypse transformed into a comfort blanket.


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