ARTICOLI / 13 / Gary Genosko /
Readers of Baudrillard know that he thought about competition in sport and games in terms of failure and frailty. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, exchange value and symbolic ambivalence are mutually exclusive domains; in the latter, desire is not satisfied through phantasmic completion, and this entails that desire may ride failure to an ignominious counter-victory. Baudrillard found in the failure to react positively to an inducement like winning a race – captured in that bizarre American football phrase appropriated as a handle by Ronald Reagan, “Win One for the Gipper!” – the principle of a radical counter-economy of needs. Losers come in all shades. But radical losers stand apart from the crowd in the virulence of their capacity to radiate loss that they throw down as a challenge. There are those who are irresistibly drawn to blowing it, and others who can taste failure and steal it from the jaws of victory. From the Beatles to Beck, the figure of the loser has fascinated lyricists and theorists alike as not merely sympathetic but as a foundation for a deliberate weakness in the face of overwhelming odds and the false pretenses of victory. Here I revisit Jean Baudrillard’s speculations about computer chess programs, specifically IBM’s Deep and Deeper Blue, and how best to play against them. Drawing on Baudrillard’s theory of loss in sports as an act of contempt for the fruits of victory, institutional accommodation, and the cheap inducements of prestige and glory, I examine how chess masters like Garry Kasparov have met the challenge of the brute force programs – some of which were congealed models of his own play – with appeals to a kind of unforced play and even “non-thought.” Considering the malevolent and fictional computer system HAL, as well as Deep Blue and subsequent programs, right up to IBM’s Jeopardy-playing computer “Watson,” this paper looks at ways to defeat programming power by critically regaining the counter-technical and (dys)functional skills of the loser.
