As Naomi Klein argues in No Logo, corporate branding also involves corporate censorship: “those who make these choices have the power to reengineer the cultural landscape,” Klein writes, with an opening epigraph from a manager of Wal-Mart who regularly pulls magazines with provocative covers (165). This historical branding haunts the contemporary quasi-personal “branding,” and it haunts the forthcoming analysis of PC Principal too who opposes paid content and the interpellation of people as (mere) advertisements (though this too is complicated in the South Park franchise). The usage also relates to the practice of using a branding-chute (first recorded usage in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine out of Pittsburgh in 1882 similar to branding-yards in Great Britain) as a method of enclosure that leads cattle down a narrow path for branding, dehorning, or other corporeal acts of violence ( OED “branding”). Despite the neoliberal popularity of this marketing language, etymologically, branding involves the corporeal mark of burning, as with a hot iron, for the primary purpose of assigning ownership to property, such as slaves who were physically branded by their white owners in the United States. ![]() The popular use of “branding” to describe such dubious practices of creating a “personal brand” involves a failure to be attuned to one’s own interpellation as a commodified object in an immaterial economy. Footnotes, as a reminder, follow each other not only numerically but also fugally, horizontally and vertically. While my study does not argue for as much of a post-humanist materiality, like Bennett, I am interested in the commonplace and even marginal features, objects, images, mechanics, and narratives in video games, which is what I follow. Jane Bennett makes a similar note of what she “follows” in the Derridean sense in her Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, and she adds that what and who she follows in her post-humanist argument for the distributed agency of things requires “a certain willingness to appear naïve or foolish, to affirm what Adorno called his ‘clownish traits’” (xiii). Sense of the following always implied in being, and always in response to a call: “follower and followed, hunter knowing itself to be hunted, seducer and seduced, persecutor and fugitive conjugated not only in the same animal, the same animot, but in the same instant” ( Animal 55). Here and throughout, I use “follow” in Derrida’s While the chronotope of the fart would be easy to dismiss as juvenile humor, it instead can serve as an exceedingly helpful lens to disrupt the stability of the aforementioned divisions that often inhibit the emergence of justice in a given moment. Through the chronotope of the fart and its various “movements” in the game, I continue thinking through matters of ontology, justice, censorship, laughter, ethics, and discourse, challenging players (and scholars) to engage this game based on the fraught though crucially important value of laughter to political relation in the threshold space that disturbs the reductive logic of oppositions including parody/pastiche, public/private, intimacy/offense, masculinity/femininity, and material/immaterial. Tracing the chronotopic fart as pharmakon through Chaucer, Joyce, and Beckett-the pharmakon of writing and the pharmakon of gaming-I argue that Fractured’s positioning of the fart in the game serves as a playful allegory of various aspects of gaming. This chapter argues that parodic discourse and laughter invoked by “abject” play, particularly as seen in the chronotope of the fart, is possible-even if rare-amidst a game and discourse filled with pastiche. ![]() Laughter at the abject and in archipelagic relation to others is taken up more directly in this chapter in a related chronotope: the chronotope of the fart as pharmakon in South Park: The Fractured But Whole.
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