Venise Sauvée

Another confessional

I write, at least this first paragraph, in the drowned Piazza San Marco, a flood of rain from the south propelling a raise of water only a few inches, to fill the gaps left by the bastardised tide of the Mediterranean. It is a scrawl in a battered black notebook, a fetish object worn out through an arduous odyssey in the arteries of the tube. Today, now, it finds itself in front of the Basillica San Marco, penned between scribbling a postcard and fleeing to an art gallery, in the presence of a scared bird, reified by the gaze of an inquiring pigeon sitting atop the Doge’s palace. It strikes me here, after trudging through this turgid flood, that there is no city that isn’t also Dunwall.

An elegy for the loss of my second sister; a bitter aftertaste of someone who is always slightly beyond familiarity, distantly within a sense of love. We meet at a point where her gaze is the only fissure in the armour of a suit and tie.

The city has always intrigued me (as a space); the production of the urban, in the sociological sense, the gathering of capital and the lechering off the rural worker, but also the creation of the multitude that pre-exists the city itself. Calvino understands this, specifically in the way that Venice (and perhaps every city) folds in on itself, as a thing that can only be Other, an Other that becomes a geology. The logic of a city, therefore, is one that is always incumbent in off-handedness, but messianic in the inability to precipitate. One cannot know a city (be a citizen, perhaps) until one cannot think of anything below the soles of one’s feet as the cobbles of the road, the unrelenting footfall as a familiarity second only to a lover. And yet, the contours of our familiarity escapes us; the process of the city, the rhythm that underlies my gait, that which determines my experience of the city –this cannot be regarded as anything but Other. Who among us can say that we have not experienced a new city, a city un-familiar to our own, in the rounding of an innocuous corner? There is always an expectancy of the revelation, a rupture that creeps up and yet is also never fully surprising, the realisation of change that can only shock oneself in the parapraxis of the humble bistro. So thus, the question: can one grasp the city? Or indeed; who is the city for, in the last instance?

A derivative drive, a need for annihilation, I debase myself for her praise. She sees something less than, I see her as mirrored aspiration; a perfection beyond the gauze. There is no room for me in my reflection.

The basis for a lot of Althusser’s reading(s) is contained within his seminal collection, For Marx – namely the renunciation of the subject of history and a refocusing on the process, the motor force, of history; the proletariat not as the I which enacts, but class conflict as that which propels history and pre-exists class structure itself. Enacting a reading of Brecht, the conception of subject-less art is not unfamiliar within Althusser’s writings (we must think of “A Letter on Art” or “The ‘Piccolo Teatro”) – self-consciousness, the subject as realised in the Hegelian sense, “is never anything but the image of ideological consciousness.” The process with which Brecht therefore refuses identification of a character is a direct resistance against the ideological character of classical theatre, that of an uncriticised bourgeoise character. The effect of Brecht’s distancing is, therefore, not just a removal of the theatre of scene of identification but also the removal of the I-subject, a displacement of the self to be recognised. In identifying the character, the subject of the city, one must ask; is there a character at all? Or merely the process which makes it possible?

She peeks over a shoulder, tells me to dash right, then up. It takes me four attempts and by the time I succeed the city is a functionary rather than a city, no more than the backdrop for mechanical execution.

Thus, finally, we arrive at Dunwall (Venice as Dunwall, London as Venice). The character, the subject of Dunwall is not the player – indeed, the player as identification is almost entirely lost in a smoggy sea of a thousand minor breaks (each reload, each save a dis-identification). No where is the player to be found within the scope of the city; only as a phantasmatic projection onto an already woven fabric (the fabric, of course, only ever alluded to), reduced through interaction into intersecting vertexes and planes. Therefore – there is the city prior to the player, and the city as the mechanical substance. The latter is trite, the former imaginary. We must instead talk of Dunwall prior to the game (as locus of interaction), only as cuts and disjunctive flows, an a-priori condition of our play within the game-scape but something that can only be deciphered. Because, after all this, the scope of the theatre in Dishonored is not a disidentification with the subject (a la Brecht), but rather a re-identification via displacement. Again, the subject can exist nowhere within our actual experience of the game, but rather it can only ever exist within the projection away, behind, anterior to it; what we play is merely the dreamscape of the originary trauma. Thus, the subject – along with the city itself – can only be uncovered, in the manner of the light-handed archaeologist sifting through a fine sieve.

She laughs in excess as I die, a third time in a row; the experience of the flow of the game permanently stained by her voice. How much of the flesh she touched can I carve away till I’m no longer there?

However, there is a correlated effect from the disjunctive twist that gameplay induces; the phantasmatic ideality of the city counter-produces a phantasmatic ideality of the game; the game as game does not exist outside of my expected memories, because the game as game is always stitched together, an ironing out of the cracks – a missed jump off the side of a map ignored for a clean threading through. So, there is a doubled ideality in any actual experience of the city, both of the experience as retrospect, and of the city as expectation. Nowhere is this game cohesive (or perhaps we should ask: can a game be unified?) Instead, the whole only exists within a projection of it backwards, the consistency a metaphorized depiction, the game itself betraying a constant anxiety over the violence it requires to marshal itself, the origin and unification which escapes it. Here again, we see it in every city; London and the fanciful tale of Lud’s Gate, from the mouth of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Venice and Paduan refugees, Rome and Ovid’s Aeneid. The story of the memory outstrips anything else, the line of narrative soldering together fractured minutiae.

Years drenched by her absence, wrapped around by a voice and coiling penmanship, before I feel through to skin; a miracle a half decade in the making. I see her and I realise the distance that yawns between us (an altus, doubled).

What is then the subject of Dunwall? It cannot be the process of class struggle – for fundamentally, an a-priori phantasmatic projection can only be ahistorical. Nor can it be a Hegelian coming-to-consciousness; again, this requires a recognition that the city is unable to perform – there is only a hermetic interiority even in the fractured image. Rather, the subject of the city is the generative process of all cities, the myth of the city – not of the Ur-city, the Arkhe-city, the city before writing, before thought, a city-before-city, but rather the common city, the city who’s only sensibility is the place already known, already been – not via transcendental signifiers but via commonality, the manner in which the city attempts to project backwards via shared manner. The River, for example, is a unifying, homogenising force; the Seine to the Thames to the Tiber to the Moskva to the Huangpu. The city is diffracted, Other, in every instance, but it attempts to regale us, convince us with the exultation in the significance of the water, the rhythm of the tide, the casualness of the curb. The relegation of the ideality of the character of the city is therefore an act of loaning, borrowed from a thousand different slivers. Here, one cannot talk about the character of this ideality without remembering that which it borrows from; the fishery I walk past from day by day refracted back to me by the dying light of the afternoon sun, whale flesh burning, the sound of fish scales beating against one another, a writhing crate.

Teeth rip into my throat, vomit still pooling on my tongue as she kisses. She pushes me into the underbrush, and I cannot (don’t want to?) resist. I black out with her fingers down my throat; I come to, and dreams are rendered unimaginable.

So, we rejoin. What is the subject of Dishonored? There is none; there can be no unified character, no self-same experience, only ever the folding back of a thousand different moments. The fundamentally bourgeoise (republican, idealist, monarchist) character that it attempts to unify/collapse/brand into memory is illusory, not only in premise but also in promise. But there is no way to dissociate the form of narrativisation outside of memory; and therefore I can only remember by reaching towards the limits of the map.

Memory without fault, without excess; a mirror-image without distance.

A few sources
Althusser, L., 1977. For Marx. London: Verso.
Althusser, L., 2014. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso.
Arkane Studios, 2012. Dishonored. Bethesda Softworks.
Brecth, B., 2016 Brecth Collected Plays: Six. Bloomsbury: New York
Calvino, I., 1974. Invisible Cities. 1st Edition ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company.
Mann, T., 1991. Death in Venice and Other Stories. Reissue ed. s.l.:Bantam Classics.
Morris, J., 1960. The World of Venice. 1st Edition ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
Weil, S., 2019. Venice Saved. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.