Rick Elmore
BioShock Infinite begins with the question of “founding.” One enters Columbia for the first time on “Secession Day,” the anniversary of Columbia’s secession from the United States in 1902, and the commemoration of the founding of Columbia as the “New Eden.” In order to enter the city, however, players (as Booker DeWitt) must be baptized, a symbolic refounding of the individual as a new, “saved” person.
Founding is an age-old problem in political philosophy, the question of how one establishes a legitimate legal and political system. For much of human history, this legitimacy was thought to come from God, leaders claiming a right to rule as a representative of the divine. But ever since the Enlightenment and its emphasis on personal freedom, democracy, and the secular state, there has been a push to see political legitimacy as coming from other sources, like power, the people, law, or science. This change raised new problems for political theory, not the least of which is beautifully captured in one of the first Voxophone recordings that players encounter in BioShock Infinite.
In the Voxophone entitled “Every Man All at Once,” Comstock says of baptism:
one man goes into the waters of baptism. A different man comes out, born again. But who is that man who lies submerged? Perhaps that swimmer is both sinner and saint, until he is revealed unto the eyes of man.
In the moment before an individual emerges from the waters of baptism, she is both sinner and saint, neither clearly saved nor clearly damned. This ambiguity of baptism is the very ambiguity at the heart of secular political founding. The problem with founding a new legal order is that the moment of that founding is logically prior to the legal order itself, since you have to establish laws before you can practice them. However, this means that the founding of the law is always outside the law and is, therefore, not legal. Every founding of a new law is from the beginning unjustifiable within the legal order that it founds.
The result of this problematic logic is that it seems to throw a wrench into the possibility of founding a legitimate secular and democratic state. If no constitutional democracy can justify its constitutional legality, then from where does its legitimacy come? This is the question that Comstock’s first Voxophone asks us to consider: From where does legitimacy come? In the non-secular state, the answer to this question was easy: God. However, with secular states we need a new answer. This issue is even more complicated for democratic states, since the power that founds them must itself be democratic, in order to avoid the embarrassing notion of a democracy based on an undemocratic exercise of power or military force. Hence, the desire to ground the legitimacy of the secular state is one of the defining problems of modern political and democratic theory, and it is also the question with which BioShock Infinite begins. OK. So what do we do with this conundrum?
One of the best-known and most influential attempts to solve the problem of founding was proposed by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), who argued that all political communities are based on “the antithesis between friend and enemy.”1 For Schmitt, it isn’t constitutional or legal arrangements that ground political communities, but divisions between antagonistic groups. The antagonisms between these groups can, Schmitt contends, come from any number of places: race, class, nationality, ideology, and so forth. However, the enemy has to be “in a specifically intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme cases conflicts with him are possible.”2 The “enemy group” has to be different and alien enough to the “friend group” so that, in extreme circumstances, they would be willing to go to war with each other. On the basis of this fundamental antagonism, Schmitt argues that one can found legitimate secular states, since the fundamental antagonism between “the people” and their “enemy” constitutes a true and legitimate expression of the will of “the people.” Hence, the legitimacy of the secular state rests, for Schmitt, on the power of the friend/enemy distinction to provide a basis for constitutional law. Yet a politics founded on an antagonism between friend and enemy groups is certainly not limited to democratic states, as is clear from the example of Columbia in BioShock Infinite.
Columbian society defines itself against a number of enemies in the Schmittian sense: the white supremacy, classism, secessionism, theocracy, and anti-democratic fervor of Columbia all mark defining antagonisms. Columbia’s identity is solely based on its difference from the America below, which has, its people claim, become too accommodating to the non-white, lower-class, secular, and democratic. The first two-thirds of the game are a tour of these antagonisms from the racism of the Raffle and the Fraternal Order of the Raven, to the authoritarian patriotism of Duke and Dimwit, and the classism of Fink’s docks and factory. Players see the racist underpinnings of Columbia’s economic structure, and play through mock-ups of Wounded Knee and the Boxer Rebellion, events on which Columbia bases its claim to independence. Hence, BioShock Infinite exemplifies Schmitt’s concept of the political, as grounded on fundamental antagonisms that express the will of “the people” (which is to say, the will of most of the well-to-do white people) of Columbia. However, Columbia’s antagonisms also expose some of the tensions in Schmitt’s understanding of politics.
The game-defining political antagonism of BioShock Infinite is that between Comstock and the Vox Populi. Players learn of the Vox Populi and its leader, Daisy Fitzroy, early on from overheard conversations, Kinetoscopes, and, most explicitly, the carnival games on the way to the Raffle. The Vox is an underground resistance fighting against Comstock in the name of the oppressed people of Columbia. Their relationship with Comstock is a Schmittian antagonism in the truest sense, as they are more than willing to go to war with their political adversary. In the end, however, the Vox prove just as violently ideological and tyrannical as Comstock, a point hammered home when players must thwart Fitzroy’s execution of Fink’s young son, for nothing more than the “crime” of being his offspring. The antagonism between the Vox and Comstock leads, in the end, to a tyranny by the Vox.
Why this reversal? Is it the result of power-hungry leadership? Mistakes? Or the corrupting influence of power? Much in the game, particularly DeWitt’s constant doubts about the Vox’s true motives, points toward the last of these conclusions: the notion that political power always corrupts democratic and egalitarian ideals. This reversal raises doubts about the possibility of grounding democratic power on antagonism and conflict, as it seems to lead, at least in the case of the Vox, to anti-democratic results. However, this kind of reversal is logically entailed by a Schmittian notion of politics.
In Schmittian politics, the friend/enemy antagonism grounds political identity. It wholly defines the group identity of both friend and enemy. The result of this is that a positive political identity is impossible, since only opposition defines one’s political identity: “we are what they aren’t.” This lack of a positive identity helps to explain the reversal of the Vox, since if one’s identity is based purely on opposition to another group, the destruction of that group entails the destruction of one’s own identity. What is the Vox Populi without Comstock? Without the tyranny of Comstock to define themselves against, the Vox lose all sense of themselves. They literally cannot survive without tyranny to fight against, so that when they overthrow the tyrant, they must immediately invent a new one (Fink’s son), an invention that leads them ironically into tyranny themselves. So, from a Schmittian perspective, the Vox’s reversal is not a mere accident of poor leadership or human nature, but is the logical consequence of conceiving politics in terms of a friend/enemy divide. Yet this dependence on an enemy is more than a merely theoretical problem, as illustrated in the racism of Columbia’s economic system.
Racial difference is one of the major antagonisms in BioShock Infinite. Columbia is a white supremacist society modeled on the segregationist past of the United States. The racist iconography of chattel slavery, the repression of Native Peoples, and hatred toward Asians and the Irish all invoke forms of racial violence historically found in the United States. In addition, the events that lead to Columbia’s secession are the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890) and the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). Both of these events link political power and racial violence—Wounded Knee marking the end of large-scale resistance to the US government’s theft and appropriation of Native lands; and the Boxer Rebellion marking a nationalist, anti-imperialist movement in China and the first time a US president sent troops overseas without congressional approval (in clear violation of the US Constitution, might I add). Hence, these events illustrate the collusion between racism, property rights, and constitutional authority. But, as players quickly discover, this racist antagonism is not merely political; it also grounds Columbia’s entire economic structure.
Shortly after fighting through the first waves of police following the Raffle, players find a prominently placed Voxophone, which explains that Columbia’s economy is run on a workforce of black penal labor from the state of Georgia. It turns out that while professing hatred, intolerance, and the exclusion of non-whites from Columbian society, Columbia is, in reality, entirely dependent on a mostly non-white labor force. In addition, racism and classism are aligned throughout, a connection made most explicit in the propaganda film on Fink’s Dock, comparing owners to lions and workers to oxen, with the voiceover: “Oxen cannot become lions.” One of the most powerful elements of this aspect of the game is its relation to the real history of the United States, whose economy was for many decades run on the labor of slaves and a system of slave plantations.
The questions of racism, classism, and wealth inequality remain pressing issues in American social and political life. However, in relationship to Schmitt’s argument, one sees here that the logical dependency of the friend group on its enemy is also a material dependency, the friend group being unable to expel its enemy for want of their labor power. So racism proves to be much more than a mere political or social antagonism in BioShock Infinite, operating rather as the primary means of producing and maintaining economic stability. Now, certainly all the links here to US history challenge us to think about the connections between racism, classism, and economics in America. In addition, the material nature of the friend/enemy distinction should come as no surprise, given Schmitt’s emphasis on the “existential” (meaning really existing) differences that this distinction entails. However, this overall logic of dependence between the friend and the enemy creates a paradox in Schmitt’s theory.
Schmitt’s concept of the political leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the enemy group must be both expelled and included in political life. On this logic, politics becomes the strange operation of expelling the unexpellable or of continuously trying to expel the unexpellable. The result of this logic is that politics becomes a process of constant and endless war, constant because antagonism is the basis of all politics, and endless because one can’t ever eliminate the need for an enemy group. In order to appreciate the importance and danger of this logic, one need go no further than the example of America’s War on Terror, a war that seems endless, since there is no clearly defined enemy and, consequently, no way to identify victory. In the case of BioShock Infinite, it is in order to avoid precisely the ongoing and seemingly endless war with Comstock that players are driven finally to allow Anna to drown them (DeWitt), achieving victory by eliminating the very existence of Columbia, Comstock, and DeWitt. Here again, one can’t help but wonder if this paradox doesn’t spell disaster for the hope of grounding democratic and constitutional states, since a democracy run on a principle of war seems to foreclose “the people’s” democratic ability to pursue peace. However, this question of the importance of choice in democratic life brings us to the other great legacy of Schmitt’s political philosophy, and one of the most frequently discussed questions of modern political thought; namely, the concept of sovereignty.
Sovereignty is generally understood to be the power of an individual or organization over a geographic area. For example, all independent governments are thought to be sovereign, having the power to decide and execute all laws within their borders. Schmitt, however, defines the sovereign more specifically as “he who decides on the exception.”3 The sovereign is the one who decides when the law counts and when it doesn’t, as well as what we do during the exceptional periods in which the law does not apply. Thus sovereignty is primarily the power to make decisions within a period of crisis or national emergency, when the law is suspended. Schmitt argues that this power is not just necessary in times of emergency or crisis, but is essential for establishing the law itself.
Discussing sovereignty’s relationship to the normal structures of the law, Schmitt writes that “for a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”4 Given that sovereignty is the power to decide when the law doesn’t count, it follows that it is also the power to decide when the law does count, since the power to decide on the exception is also, logically, the power to decide on the norm. Sovereignty, thus, makes possible the founding of a legal and political order and is another name for the power exercised by the antagonism of the friend/enemy distinction, the sovereign will of the people. Now, as sovereignty is, for Schmitt, fundamentally aligned with the friend/enemy distinction, it would not be surprising if it suffered from the same kind of paradoxical structure.
The power to make a decision, to choose one thing over another, to say I’ll take this and not that, is the power of sovereignty. As Schmitt writes, “the decision on the exception [which is to say the power of sovereignty] is a decision in the truest sense.”5 Sovereignty is the power to decide what one will do outside of any rules or laws. This is not to say that one may not have reasons for one’s decisions or a logic by which one decides between possible choices. But in the end, one must always choose whether to follow those rules or not. This lack of a governing rule is what makes sovereignty so hard to secure and justify, since, at the end of the day, there seems to be no way to adjudicate between competing sovereign claims.
How do we decide which decisions are right? When two people make opposing choices, how can we determine which is best? In fact, how could we know if any claim or decision is ever truly sovereign, legitimate, or binding? The problem here is that sovereignty leads to what philosophers call an infinite regress, every sovereign decision needing another sovereign decision to make its sovereignty legitimate, and then another, and another, into infinity. This problem of regress is just another way of talking about the paradox of the friend/enemy distinction, insofar as the expulsion of the enemy proves a contradictory and never-ending task. The detour through sovereignty shows that the problems raised by Schmitt are problems both for an individual notion of decision and responsibility and for state and political structures. In both cases, this logic poses fundamental problems for the possibility not just for legitimate decision making but also for responsibility.
The questions of decision and responsibility play a key role in the story and gameplay of BioShock Infinite. Anna becomes increasingly obsessed with whether she and Booker are responsible for the events unfolding around them. She wonders to what degree they are to blame for the violence and death they see everywhere. This worry is, however, complicated by their constant jumping through “tears” into alternative versions of Columbia, where even a small change in one reality may have massive effects in another. The problem that arises from these tears is that by splitting into multiple versions of themselves, it becomes difficult to know which version is the “real” one; that is, the one capable of being responsible for all the others. While this splitting is of course fictional, in BioShock Infinite it appears as the perfect metaphor for the infinite regress one sees in sovereignty—the search for a true, legitimate sovereign decision leading necessarily to an infinite multiplying of ultimately unjustifiable decisions. In the face of this conundrum, what can we possibly do? Or how can we ever know if we have made a justifiable decision?
Players are forced to make a number of decisions throughout BioShock Infinite, without any way of knowing what the outcomes of these decisions will be. The first is the choice of whether to throw a baseball at the couple on stage at the Raffle and the second is the choice of which necklace Anna should wear. It turns out that none of these decisions has any real impact on the game. In fact, the game seems to suggest that none of the decisions that Booker, Anna, or the player makes are of much consequence. This is true even of Booker’s saving of Anna, which does nothing to eliminate the possibility of Comstock coming to power in one of the other “lighthouse” worlds. The game, in fact, offers only one solution to these problems, and it’s a bleak one: the elimination of Booker DeWitt, and with him the very possibility of Comstock, Anna, and Columbia existing at all. The lesson of this ending seems to be that “you can’t lose, if you don’t play.” Given the problems and paradoxes faced by the attempt to ground a legitimate democratic, secular state, one can perhaps relate to this pessimistic conclusion. Maybe the only solution is simply to give up on the possibility of legitimate power and politics altogether, accepting, in the end, that politics is nothing but the exercise of power, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. And yet…
In one of the coolest-looking and creepiest segments of the game, DeWitt is whisked through a tear to a Columbia in which he was unable to rescue Anna and she became Comstock’s successor. In this world, Columbia attacks the “Sodom below” in order to exterminate the non-believers. This is the world in which Comstock’s victory is utterly complete, where the hope for freedom and revolution has entirely failed. However, even in this world, there remains a possibility of thwarting Comstock. The Anna in this world is in every way a convert to Comstock’s agenda, claiming to be unable to stop the massacre that she has put into motion. Yet it is she who opens the tear that allows Booker to return to his own time and, ultimately, to save Anna. Hence, perhaps the game’s conclusion isn’t as bleak as it seems. Maybe it’s a problem of time and hindsight?
There’s an interesting catch-22 in the choices that players are asked to make throughout BioShock Infinite. They are asked to choose between options that don’t ultimately matter. Yet they can only discover this truth by making the choices and seeing what happens. Perhaps this is the subversive, revolutionary message of BioShock Infinite, the message that speaks to the possibility of legitimate political foundings and the questions raised by Carl Schmitt—namely, that we can’t know if we have made legitimate choices or if we have the ability to challenge political oppression until we try.