Sovereignty In The Obscure: An Analysis

Inela Salkic

Final Essay Sovereignty in the Obscure When we think about that which is outside of knowledge and power, we are inspired or fascinated by what we find—whether it be the obscurity of art, dreams, or experience. That which is structureless, outside of control, and an “infinite speed of birth and disappearance” (Deleuze & Guittari, 2015) can be referred to as the chaotic, and one of the ways we respond and deal with chaos is through expressing our emotions and perceptions via art. Art enables us to explore the obscure because it involves a medium that draws us away from the world, and we are fascinated with it because it transcends what we can know and what is possible. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze discusses how the obscure

In this episode, a designer of a virtual-reality game, Robert Daly, isn’t given enough credit for his creations and isn’t treated how he expects to be treated, while his colleague who worked on the game with him gets higher praise even though his part in the game’s creation was not as large as Daly’s. Daly uses his expertise to create a version of the game privately for himself, where he steals DNA from five of his co-workers and duplicates them fully (including their consciousness) into this virtual reality as digital clones. In the game, he creates a Star-Trek like space adventure where he is the captain of a spaceship and the facsimiles of his real-life co-workers serve him and are apart of his team in defeating their arch enemy. Daly has the power to control what they do and punish them, for example, by turning them into creatures or removing their mouth if they do not obey him. He later adds another co-worker into the game, Nanette, that is a new employee in the real world, working as a programmer for the Infinity game in the Callister Inc. studio. Nanette’s virtual duplicate is the one who encourages the rest of the virtual-reality clones to revolt against Daly. The virtual reality duplicates connect with real-life Nannette through digital messages, and blackmail her into distracting real-life Daly so she can retrieve the DNA of the co-workers he has hidden in his apartment and destroy it, while the virtual-reality Nanette distracts him inside of the game to be able to control what’s going on in there and destroy the alternate world Daly has created. In the virtual-reality, Daly comes back into the game before