Gamification, Comedy and Seriousness in Hip-Hop Culture and Modern Ideology

 

            Last week, I wrote an article describing the cultural contradictions inherent in modern hip-hop culture and how they reflect the material conditions we live in¹. I listed three contradictions: the contradiction of class conflict (“I am the richest person in the poorest neighborhood”), the contradiction of authenticity (“I am real… but don’t take my music so seriously”) and the semiotic contradiction of indirect communication (clever puns and witticisms of the “Aha, I see what you did there…” form). There is a fourth one we can add here: the contradiction of seriousness.

            There is a certain dialectic between seriousness and comedy that is universal. The two are not opposites in a classical sense: if you go too much in one direction, you suddenly ‘wake up’ on the opposite side. The first direction of this dialectic is the movement from seriousness to comedy: a person who takes themselves too seriously, in a room where everyone is joking around, can have a comedic effect. The second direction is the reversed one: recklessness and fun can become a very serious endeavor in the movement from comedy to seriousness.

            Carl Jung was well aware of this. He designated the archetype of the serious “old wise man” as the senex – it espouses values like responsibility, he is either the calm Yoda or the bitter, cranky neighbor complaining about the reckless kids these days. The senex tells you to not do drugs and stay in school. He’s what Zizek calls the traditional authoritarian father². According to Jung, the shadow of the senex is the puer aeternus, or the eternal child – he is playful and reckless, you could make the argument that he does not take life “seriously”. Jung as well aware that they come in a pair. However, he still clung onto the Taoist “Yin/Yang” definition of the struggle of opposites, where the ideal state is a balance between two extremes: “just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites”³.

            Jung still used the pendulum model to understand the balance of opposites. Because of this, he believed that opposite forces in the psyche or society function like forces of action and reaction, where if you pull your bow too much in one direction, it will burst with just as much force in the opposite direction. When the psyche sticks onto one of the two extremes, he believed that the shadow (“opposite”) of that archetype will manifest unconsciously, calling this archetypal possession: “some content, an idea or a part of the personality, obtains mastery of the individual for one reason or another. The contents which thus take possession appear as peculiar convictions, idiosyncrasies, stubborn plans, and so forth”⁴.

            Jung was not radical enough in his analysis of opposites: the shadow side of an archetype or conviction isn’t like a pendulum that swings back, it is like Mobius Strip.

    Lacan and Zizek use the mathematical model of the Mobius strip to explain pairs of opposites like love/hate, signifier/signified, etc. The Mobius strip is a geometrical figure which only has one side globally, and yet at any local point, one can distinguish an opposite. Because of this, an ant traversing a Mobius strip can wake up on the seemingly ‘opposite’ side without ever abruptly crossing an edge, Zizek explains it like this:

 

“Let’s begin with the ‘coincidence of the opposites’ as the basic principle of dialectics. The common view which reduces this coincidence to the notion of reality as a permanent struggle of the opposing tendencies has nothing whatsoever to do with dialectics proper, it is simply a new version of the ancient vision of cosmos as the struggle of two opposed principles (masculine and feminine, light and darkness, etc.). In contrast to these views, the dialectical coincidence of the opposites refers to something much more precise: to a twisted or convoluted space in which a line, brought to its extreme, punctually coincides (or, rather, intersects) with its opposite. In topology, the most elementary form of this coincidence is the Möbius strip.

(...)

The dialectical process in which error creates the space for truth, and in which universality and its particular content are mediated, is exemplary of the symbolic space, so it is no wonder that this space (what Lacan calls “the big Other”) is itself structured as a Möbius strip: language (a differential system in which every term is defined only by its difference from other terms) as a whole has to turn in an abyssal circle, lacking a positive ground. No matter how we try to ground the order of words in reality, language as a whole continues to hang in the air since this lack of an external fundament is constitutive of language.”⁵

 

            What is most important about the structure of the Mobius strip is that an object traversing it can end up on the ‘opposite’ side without one being able to pin-point the exact precise moment in which the transition was made. Because the comedy of the reckless eternal child and the seriousness of the responsible, authoritarian senex are opposites, we can only speak of a Jungian “archetypal possession” in the sense of both endlessly circling around an eternal deadlock or point of impossibility represented by the very void in the middle of the strip itself: if you go too much in one extreme (comedy or seriousness), you will end up on the other side without anyone being able to pin-point a precise, specific point in which you made the transition. This is what distinguishes this model from the Jungian pendulum that “swings back”: in the pendulum, one can distinguish a precise moment in which things turn into their opposite extreme, while in topological non-orientables like the Mobius strip or the Klein bottle, the shape is simply turned ‘inside out’ counter-intuitively.

            Hip-hop culture perfectly exemplifies one side of this dialectical reversal. If there is a Jungian “possession” of the reckless, eternal child archetype, by this we mean that the very “non-serious”, irresponsible lifestyle itself is taken seriously. Modern trap music represents that paradoxical turning point from comedy to seriousness in which partying and having fun is a matter of life and death. Living recklessly is an existential commitment: they are taking extremely seriously the very act of not taking life ‘seriously’. If the senex authority tells you “don’t do drugs, stay in school”, then the message of hip-hop music is the opposite, but this does not make it any less “serious”, quite the opposite – if they treat a lot of things like a joke, it is because it’s dark humor. They aren’t merely hypocrites, they are apostles of a “real contradiction”, as Hegel might have put it.

            Bits and pieces of pop culture perfectly illustrate these paradoxes of seriousness. Which was the parody and which was the original when Ben Shapiro reacted to Cardi B’s “WAP” song? A dialectical analysis quickly reveals the contradictory nature of the comedy of the situation. On one hand, Shapiro stood for the senex, he was taking the song so seriously that it became ridiculous and comical. On the other hand, one can also reply that, in his defense, he started by replying to an article that already took the song too seriously (an “empowering” feminist anthem), so it wasn’t Ben who ‘started it’, so to speak… The paradox here lies in observing how the very way in which the sex-positive feminism took the song too seriously was already a simulacrum to hide the fact that all of hip-hop takes itself seriously in its non-seriousness. One should echo here Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of Disneyland: “Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland [...] Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real , but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation”⁶. Just like Disneyland, the boundaries between fiction and the real, between satire and reality, between the parody and its original have all been broken into one hyperreal chaos.

Just like Freud indicated in his analysis of dreams that the “hidden meaning” of a dream is not “behind” the manifest content, but also inside the very form in which it appears⁷ (for example – the very fact that you cannot remember the dream properly can itself symbolize something about remembering your past, etc), in the same way ideology functions today. An ironical or cynical distance from the products of mass media, a joking or comical attitude is itself a way that ideology nowadays pokes fun at itself⁸ – in the case of the WAP song, the very contest of who took himself too seriously and who didn’t take sex/women seriously enough is the content within the form itself, there is little hidden meaning “behind” this culture war scandal, the hidden meaning is within the form in which it manifests. Like Alenka Zupancic perfectly put it in her book on comedy:

 

“Indeed, one can easily show that ironic distance and laughter often function as an internal condition of all true ideology, which is characterized by the fact that it tends to avoid direct “dogmatic” repression, and has a firm hold on us precisely where we feel most free and autonomous in our actions. It is very important to keep this point in mind, especially in times when freedom and free will, humor, a “positive attitude,” and a distance towards all ideologies have become the principal mode of the dominant ideology. In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive—say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults— worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life.”⁹

 

            Ultimately, hip-hop music stands for the super-ego compulsion to enjoy in modern society. Alienating technologies of long-distance communication such as social media have created a culture of fear of missing out in which having fun, partying, being reckless and enjoying life turn into moral obligations. People no longer feel guilty because they enjoyed too much (“I am a sinner”, etc.) people now feel guilty because they don’t enjoy enough. Happiness and success become a moral obligation.

            This “ridiculous seriousness” of the senex archetype is played with on all political sides on the current culture wars. Moralization is a figure of the senex, seen in both Christian puritanism and the rigid political correctness of the liberal-left’s cancel culture. However, both sides hide their own extremes as well: since in the puritan, “frigid” PC ideology there is also a reckless sexual libertinism that for the very fact that it’s so permissive it ends up turning into a second type of puritan frigidity (fake performative obsessions over consent, etc); in the same way that the alt-right has similar “puer aeternus” reckless child figures. If figures like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro represent one extreme of the senex archetype (Clean your room! Stay in school! – they take themselves so seriously to the point of comedy), then someone like Andrew Tate would be the ‘possession’ of the other extreme, the eternal child archetype – he is the epitome of today’s hip-hop culture, where the very act of not taking life seriously (or responsibly) is itself taken as seriously as ever, as a matter of life and death.

            Centrist Jungians (inspired by Jung’s analysis of World War II as a mutual shadow projection) love to say that the woke left and the alt-right mutually project onto each other their own flaws, standing for two sides of the same coin. This is only partially true; we shall radicalize this statement and view it as an example of a self-fulfilling projection. In projection, it is not always the case that first I do/am something, and only after I accuse others of doing/being that. Sometimes, the opposite happens: I BECOME that which I am accusing others of doing through the very act of accusing them (the typical Badiou/Zizek theme of the fall retroactively generating the illusion of that from which it had fallen from). For this, I have the perfect example: imagine a person who is extremely uptight and "anal" about forcing other people to relax and 'chill out'. If other people around him show even the slightest bit of stress or uptightness, this person immediately gets very angry and stressed out by it, scolding others for not being chill enough, quite paradoxically trying to pressure other people into relaxation (into not pressuring themselves). In such an example, it is not that he is first uptight/stressed and then accuses other people of that which he is only after the fact, quite the opposite: first he accuses others of being too uptight and high-strung and through the very process of doing so, he BECOMES anal and obsessive himself. The content of the projection is hidden within the form itself.

            This is how we shall analyze today’s cultural landscape – each side of the culture war is a serious-comical parody of a parody with no original. The contradictory cultural logic of 21^st century digital capitalism has created an environment in which the boundary between serious work and playful fun has evaporated (and the culture war is the symptom of the material causes) – the material forces of production have let one extreme turn into the other. Neoliberal soft managerialism gamified the work environment all while play and fun themselves have turned into a competitive struggle. This is why Zizek was wrong in his debate with Destiny for praising the current gamification of life. It is ultimately destructive, as Byung-Chul Han very nicely put it:

 

“In order to heighten productivity, emotional capitalism also enlists playing and games - which should, in fact, be the Other of Work, its opposite. Emotional capitalism is gamifying the life and working world. Playing games ends an emotional, indeed a dramatic, charge to working which in turn generates more motivation. Because games rapidly deliver a sense of success and reward, the result is higher performance and a greater yield. A person playing a game, being emotionally invested, is much more engaged than a worker who acts rationally or is simply functioning.

Games exhibit a specific temporality marked by immediate experiences of success and reward. But what matures me cannot be gamified. Whatever is long, anything lasts a long time, proves incompatible with the game's temporality. Hunting, for instance, matches the mode of the game, whereas farming, which depends on processes of ripening and quiet growth, cannot be gamified at all. Today, the gamification logic of ‘Likes’, ‘Friends’ and ‘Followers’ means that social communication is also being plugged into and subordinated to the game mode. The corollary of the gamification of communication is its commercialization. That said, this process is destroying human communication.

Excessive consumption amounts to unfreedom: compulsion corresponding to the unfreedom of labor. The neoliberal technology of power does not prohibit, protect or repress; instead, it prospects, permits and projects.”¹⁰

 

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES:

1: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/08/hip-hop-music-cultural-contradictions.html

2: https://bigthink.com/the-present/slavoj-zizek-political-correctness/

3: Carl Jung, Two essays on analytical psychology, p. 78

4: Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 220

5: Slavoj Zizek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, p. 225-229

6: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 12

7: See: Slavoj Zizek – The Sublime Object of Ideology, Chapter 1

8: See: Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Kung Fu Panda and Gangnam Style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkM1VMkCIH4

9: Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy, p. 5

10: Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, p. 49