Liberal vs Integralist Art

The game awards nominees for 2021 have prompted us to summarize the tendencies we routinely speak against on this show. The issue reduces to a liberal vs integralist stance on art (and resultantly games). Is the creation of art characterized by a transcendental ontological goal or final cause, a purpose (as sight to the eye) existing before human intervention, or can there be “reasonable pluralism” about the same? The former mandates the pursuit of the good of the work, its form or essence apart from human good or utility: the end to which “the fine arts tend is ordered to beauty; as beautiful, [the work is] an end, an absolute, it suffices of itself… and plunges deep into the transcendence and the infinity of being”[i]. The only goal the artist can entertain is “to make beauty shine in matter, the creating of the thing according to its own laws”[ii]. In such a climate, extramental or "objective" standards of criticism that locate the creation and enjoyment of art within the broader intellectual tendency to contemplate being are clear. Since art aims at beauty [in its myriad, inexhaustible manifestations] as a transcendental property of being[iii], we should leave “the artist to his art: he serves the community better than the engineer or the tradesman [as concerned directly with the separate or transcendental good] upon which the social common good depends”[iv].

If we are instead liberals or pluralists about human nature and its telos, we must resultantly adopt a posture of relativism toward beauty, with the "good" of the work being entirely reducible to the arbitrary behavior of individuals en masse (within a "market"). Here formal and final are reduced to material causes. Each individual work will lack an essence or intelligible form apart from its impact within the immanent sphere of human satisfaction & resultant market expressions. This precipitates the "ghost effect" behind marvel-and-halo style franchises, where an artistic conceit is denied its proper reality, detached from its substratum, nominalistically reduced to a “vocal sound” [or series of tropes, aesthetic] [v] , in a process not of spiritualization but incorporation[vi]. It is ceaselessly replanted in artifactual bodies to which it is deemed indifferent[vii]. Denial of formal and final causes precipitates just this procession of "simulacra without end" upon the immanent eschaton ("absolute ghost") or market plane to which the real is reduced[viii]. A ceaseless deluge of sameness bedecked in the ghostly accidents of once-real forms results: “anything that passes other than by the market is steadily cross-hatched” by its reductive axiomatic[ix].

What unifies the games offered as nominees this year? Nothing but the presumption that games qua art are in fact commodities distinguished (not by their irreducibly unique forms but) only by their ability to please and generate profit. Only disbelief in formal and final causes can accommodate a belief in "games" as a homogenous category apart from the distinct concepts they express[x].

[i] https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art5.htm

[ii] https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/artapp1.htm

[iii] https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art5.htm

[iv] https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art9.htm

[v] V2 198

[vi] Derrida Marx 158

[vii]Derrida Marx 157-8

[viii] Derrida Marx 159

[ix] Land 341

[x] https://greendragoncvr.com/blog/2021/7/2/there-is-no-such-thing-as-video-games