2500 words essay on How does global capitalism shape a politics of video games and live-streaming due in 70 hrs

Subjects and Citizens

My claim that we should be interested in gamers themselves requires an

investigation of the gamer subject as produced in and through technology. That is, we

acknowledge gamers as productive and produced in and through their live-streaming.

On the production of the subject, Stuart Hall outlines three developments. First, there is

the ‘enlightenment subject’ who is, like the ‘cartesian subject’, based on a conception of

the individual as unified and firmly located in the world, in full possession of his inner

faculties, endowed with the capacity to reason, to be conscious, and to take

responsibility as well as action. Second, there is the notion of the sociological subject

who takes on, for the first time, the lived realities of a more modern world and reflects

an awareness that the enlightenment subject can never truly be self-sufficient. We must

acknowledge, for example, that in addition to the self there is also ‘the social’,

“significant others” who also mediate prominently in the production of identity.

Finally, there is the post-modern subject, a concept that marks an end to the notion of a

stable or unified self, either socially or individually determined, in favor of a conception

of personhood that is fundamentally movable and never fixed (Hall 1995). It is my

claim that we cannot arrive at the politics of gamers without embracing the definition of

a post-modern subject, notably a subject who is not overdetermined by the psyche yet is

capable of reasoned responsibility (the enlightened self), one who is socially situated

(the sociological self) yet, centrally, emerges as discursively constituted. (the post-

modern self).

The subject who is constituted in and through discourse is nevertheless a subject

with agency. Foucault clarifies:

Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which

only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in

anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is

employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals

circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously

undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target:

they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the

vehicles of power, not its point of application (Foucault 1980;98).

Thus, the subject is both ‘a subject of power’ and ‘subjected to power.’ Gamers, then,

must be considered as actors and acted upon. As Isin and Ruppert argue, cyberspace,

then, is a complex space of “becoming citizens,” and it is through digital acts from

subjects simultaneously of and to power that we uncover an emerging politics in a

digital age (Isin et al., 2015). Theirs is a project centred on bridging the gaps in

theorization between classical understandings of “politics” and “the citizen” and new

formulations of digital rights claims that occur online. Digital citizens are emerging

who continue to articulate claims to a variety of “things” over the internet. Whereas

classical conceptions of citizenship offer the subject as defined exclusively by

possession of rights and obligations as belonging to the nation-state, critical

interpretations, of which the digital citizen is a vital emerging figure, illustrate how

there can be new categories of citizenship that are negotiated as well as performed

rather than simply codified and received. Critical citizenship and the complex of

becoming digital citizens evolves from an understanding of the subject as fluctuant not

by discarding the state-centric view but by amending its reach and formative function in

much the same way as the post-modern subject becomes a vehicle of power. The digital

citizen performs and struggles over rights claims online with ramifications extending

beyond borders and legal orders both material and virtual.

In many ways, in the forthcoming analysis of gamers on Twitch, where gamers

aspire to ‘participate’, ‘connect,’ and ‘share,’, activities that Isin and Ruppert identify as

qualities which come to define the character of the digital citizen, I share conceptual

terrain with those scholars who write from a position of critical citizenship, those who

claim to be distinct from yet sharing a history with classical theorization. I call the

question ‘gamer or citizen?’ in this thesis to unsettle the classical/digital divide while

expanding understandings of the citizen/subject in a digital age. The notion of the

gamer citizen is both inherited from a dominant discourse of disaffection in game

studies (see Chapter 2) and is emerging in communities on Twitch.tv. The gamer is

both produced and producing on stream.