Deleuze + Signalis
This ended up more an essay than a review. Also, I’m not going to cite this properly, but all sources are provided at the end. Sorry! ^w^
CW for suicide/death

Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead are a series of Swiss symbolist paintings, painted through five separate versions of the same scene, produced from 1880 to 1886. It depicts someone rowing to/from a crescent-like island, a second figure stands at the stern, statuesque in white, as if marble. The island is large, foreboding, the figures small, miniature-esque, no matter the medium or year. I’m not particularly enamoured by the piece itself, but the idea of the repetitions and transformations of the same concept has always interested me, the impression of the painting untied, always linked to the ways that they are represented to us. In different variations, the disturbances of the water from the prow shows the boat moving towards or away from the island. Especially interesting is the fact that Böcklin edited the first version – updated, perhaps – to keep it in line with an addition he made to the second. The boat and the figures aboard were not an original fixture in the piece, when now it is what the eye focuses on. The stability of the scene is disrupted through this edit, the rowing man and the standing woman, art made into the white foam off a wave of continuity rather than the stagnant permanence imposed in galleries.

One of the main themes which struck me from SIGNALIS is Die Toteninsel, a reference to the origin of the repeated motif– a semi-hypnotic 5 note pattern, crawling as it changes – from Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, which itself was inspired by a black and white reproduction of Böcklin's Isle of the Dead he saw in 1907. The adaptation of this theme by 1000 Eyes is a tad slower, but rather than seeming lethargic, it allows an emphasis on the ephemeral quality of the original’s opening, sometimes lost even in the best of recordings, such as Pletnev’s hastier version, with the Russian National. It’s the primary reason as to why I far prefer Svetlanov’s recording, with the BBC Symphony, even to Rachmaninoff’s own recording; an unusual pacing allows more creative handling and a far more deliberate and lasting progression towards the Dies Irae – one accentuated by viola tremolo, of all things. These first five notes, however, are the prelude to the scene itself, the point at which the music most embodies the painting: a slow drift over a calm surface, the prow of Charon’s boat only lending to a kind of intense, fixated, stillness. The mist-drenched scene is one inscribed with a sense of dread, gentle movement over slight eddies towards something more, something worse.

The music is one of the main draws of any game for me, and the use of semi-acerbic industrial noises in Riot Control made teeth itch in a way few game soundtracks have. This is a staple of the soundtrack, a kind of grating-ness which puts into harsh relief the relation between the character and environment, rooms hostile even within the apparent human basis of construction. Therefore, the pieces which break from this allow a reprieve from anxiety inducing hallways, leaving the repeated use of the 5/8 motif unusually affecting. It again rears its head in Ewige Wiederkunf – another name verging on pun, eternal return – this time on the organ (an easy way to win my heart), where the haunting quintuplet gives way for a rippling layer, itself only making space for almost sporadic piano notes; the placid sea of noise formed by the organ remains, even as it fades out of understanding.

In a critical but also fundamentally historical turn, Deleuze attempts to peel back the layers of domination representation has secured in his genetic-evaluative principle-thesis, Difference and Repetition. This is primarily done through a dissection of identity and how difference and repetition relate. Importantly, and easily misunderstandable, he explores this through the concept of intensive difference – differences that are fundamentally changed through itself. For example, length – 2 centimetres being divisible into two identical lengths – is extensive, whereas temperature – 2 degrees being divided results in one degrees (0-1) being different from the other (1-2) – is intensive. The entire project is, essentially, following this to the logical conclusions, the real escaping the stability afforded by the Platonic forms, replaced with an embroiling sea of immanence.

The centrality of the focus of pure difference in Deleuze’s philosophy is difficult not to understate: difference not between fixed identities but between expressions of pure movement, alteration between undefined points. This process, of differentiation of Ideas as multiplicities of intensive difference, is attempted in the same way that the dy/dx makes visible the Idea of the curve. The relations of Ideas and the Ideas themselves are ungraspable, where nothing is afforded proper stability, leading to an ontology married to becoming. While Ideas are not actual, Deleuze wants to validate their ontological realness, allowing for the virtual, the realm of pure intensive difference, coming about through the interconnectedness of the series, determining the structural properties through bringing into relation a multiplicity of other undetermined elements, without ascribing predicates to a subject. The virtual is thus alternative to the real-possible distinction, allowing an Idea – something that exists entirely in the virtual – to plague us from outside the world of the actual, but within the real. To make something actualised is therefore not to make something new, but instead merely to realise the virtual via creative process, which in turn reciprocally produces change within the virtual itself. We cannot ever grasp the virtual, only ever feel the effects of it, in the same way that trauma is never itself actualised. With multiple expulsions of a single trauma, the repetition is defined via variation along the difference of each substantiation of it, rather than the trauma itself as singular, separable, identity. As Willliams explains, ‘[Each] walk that you take everyday is different each time and significant each time because it involves variations in intensities with respect to earlier and later ones and changing relations with wider series. You change with the walk and with the sensations and their intensities’. Thus, each walk is made unique, but also reciprocally determined by and determines the subject.

The Swiss modernist Gerard Meier wrote a novel of the same title – Toteninsel – a slow, drifting chat between two aging men, the long speeches of one blurring to the thoughts of the other. In the few rare moments of silence from Baur, Bindshädler considers the plight of the crickets, the ‘philharmonic muscle orchestra’, a background layer of the distant noise of the world, inhabiting and inhibiting the walk. The descriptions emphasise the almost alien nature of it – teeth on wings, ears on legs –exaggerating the etchings the world imprints on us, a blade caressing the lines of the body. The book is intensely occupied with art, past walking alongside present in poorly disguised autobiography, riddled in the spiralling structures of sentences. Art exhibits exactly what Meier is so fascinated by in the face of his twilight years: intensities encroaching, interrupting, yet also furnishing a winding wend.

Death in the sphere of the virtual becomes something extended beyond the death in the actual. It is inspired by Freudian and Heideggerian deaths, where the actual death becomes an event our entire lives become determined by, in relation towards – Freud with the death drive, Heidegger with being-towards-death. In either case, life is defined by its cessation. However, Deleuze’s use of death is more forgetfulness, an amnesia of what we were to allow for the birth of what we are, and what we will be. The small deaths dissolve the self, allowing for a constant state of becoming. These can only be understood as virtual deaths, opposed to the final cessation that the actual death provides us. In order to connect anew, we must relinquish the permanence of any particular self or body, a ritual forgetting. Suicide brings an odd dilemma, in the sense that it appears to try and force the actual death and its double to release together, to be entangled and intertwined in one singularity. The deaths of the virtual and the actual death can never resolve, however, so every suicide is ultimately futile; the deaths in the virtual cannot coalesce with the actual, because the actual suicide creates new intensities even as it cancels older ones. Therefore, the actual and the virtual play a dance, always at arm’s length from one another, following each other’s moves – an unequal one, but so too ballet. Each attempt to force the two only releases new intensities, re-interpreted back into the actual.

Why do I bring Deleuze up in a review ostensibly about SIGNALIS? Perhaps to make use of a philosophy degree of rapidly waning usefulness. But also because I believe that SIGNALIS can only be understood in its obscurities. Instead of dismissing the usage of historical artifacts in the game-space as heavy-handed and ill-construed emphases on the loop-like nature, paratextual instances are instead the basis for understanding the relations of characters; each is formed by and generates its own intensities through disruptions, each one reaffirming and in turn determining the virtual. To understand the game as an intertwinement of transcendent characteristics – a repetition of Elster’s love, or an element of over-arching permanence to Ariane’s identity – completely ignores the lengths to which dominance of a singular, identarian approach is undercut.

SIGNALIS can be most thoroughly felt in impressions from the bones and carcasses of others; the safe rooms and puzzles are eerily (and often frustratingly) similar to older Resident Evil games, the abstracized plot to Silent Hill, the setting to Dead Space, the regurgitation of classic music (Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schubert). Most notably and obviously there are textual references to the King in Yellow (Chambers), Die Toteninsel (Böcklin), and The Shore of Oblivion (Bracht). Each one is thrown at the player, obtuse and pernicious. And yet the lacerating effect of this, the shifting perspectives, the jarring cutscenes allows a recognition of the repeated structures undergirding. A thousand bodies cushioning a landing in an elevator shaft, the game is built out of repetition and parallels. The laboured grasping through metal halls is remade in these disruptions – or perhaps remade because of its disruptiveness – allowing for an art which attempts to shake an understanding of it as whole.

To secure this, the physicality of SIGNALIS’ world dissolves, achieved through flickering in and out of art-styles and aesthetics and location – [THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK]. Ariane repeats in Alina, intensities re-iterating within a realm of un-actualised existence. Falke and Ariane and Alina, Elster and Elster and Elster; multiplicities from which are differentiated the same principle, each one a terrible death, each one a painful birth. Obvious differences only serve to contour the repetition itself, an incision in the whole. Messages sent, repeated, received through four different languages. Each character is exposed as pure becoming, death encountered in the unconscious of life, a complete destabilisation of the singular identity, reconstructed only through the teeth of each other. Repeated virtualities are present in actualisation, the devotion for one and another, the relationship of each serving to shape an undetermined Idea that exists behind all of them, present through mirrored scenes, and yet all reciprocally entangled; self-referentiality which cannot be severed. The stylistic flare – poses imitated in cuts, traced scenes from Ghost in the Shell, a 5/8 motif seeping in, The Isle of the Dead and The Shore of Oblivion – becomes obvious, each serving not to show similarities between the two but differences in the whole via disruption. And what is this all in service of? Simply put, a-normative Queer love (Queer as other, Queer as wrong).

What is actually gained from this reading, however? What new is formed? It can transubstantiate away confusion to a baseline solidity, explain the impenetrability of the text as ‘actually that’s the whole point’ in a twist which can only be seen as self-righteously hipster-esque. My intent is moreso an understanding of the game as Queer (interfering), first and foremost. Blind devotion entwined with constant undercutting of the Actual challenges our pre-held notion of the Real - all that is solid melts into air. Set-dressing here is made to focus this idea; a vapid gesticulation towards authoritarian systems as shorthand for rigid absoluteness is merely a way for the Queer to break through in fleshy contortion. And, as Elster on the Penrose, perceived wholeness melts away in the exposure of the brutal alterity of art. The shredding of textual membranes within SIGNALIS forces the player to confront the indigestible, to re-align oneself, where one cannot understand it merely by grasping the whole, but instead through tracing the relation between repeated elements. Put simply, the deep-rooted un-intelligibility of disparate, colliding slices allows for a prioritisation of foreign intensities, and thus the encounter with a radical Other.

For this is something I have not touched on. The interminable project of all French philosophers rears its head once again; an absence, an unfinished question within Deleuze’s project. The Self/Other and real interaction with alterity is left absent, or open. Interpretations of Deleuze agree that he tends towards a structure for an ethical system: do not ‘explicate oneself too much with the other, not to explicate the other too much'. Express your singularity, replay the events that make and unmake you, experiment with others through creative destruction. SIGNALIS should be understood as an attempt of Deleuzian ethics, between the game and the player, between the relations of art, between the self and its repetitions. Each artifact is thus a fracture of art, tearing the smooth skin of our attention, an attempt to facilitate radical divergences, rekindling relations, forcing them more strange, more obscure, more unsettling. An otherness that always introduces new intensity, that disfigures and removes; Ariane to Elster.

Love driven from/by destructive (creative) need, an otherness which rips apart and claws back together. I miss it.


Works Cited
Böcklin, A. (1880). Isle of the Dead: Basel. Oil on canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.
Böcklin, A. (1880). Isle of the Dead: New York. Oil on board. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Böcklin, A. (1883). Isle of the Dead: Third Version. Oil on board. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Böcklin, A. (1886). Isle of the Dead: Fifth Version. Oil on board. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.
Barnard, N., Moore, R., & Lace, I. (2010, March 10). Comparative reviews of 10 unidentified performances of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead by three MusicWeb reviewers. Retrieved from MusicWeb International: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2010/Mar10/Isle_of_the_dead_composite.htm
Bracht, E. (1889). The Shore of Oblivion. Oil on canvas. Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Darmstadt.
Bracht, E. (1911). The Shore of Oblivion. Oil on canvas. Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, Münster.
Chambers, R. W. (2017). The King in Yellow. London: Pushkin Press.
Chopin, F. (1971). Prelude Op.28 No.15 [Performed by V. Horowitz]. New York City, New York, USA.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. New York: Athlone Press Limited.
Hubert, L. (2004). Arnold Böcklin: Die Toteninsel. Traumbild des 19. Jahrhunderts. Kunsthistorische Arbeitsblätter, 71.
Meier, G. (2011). Isle of the Dead. Dalkey Archive Press.
Rachmaninoff, S. (1929). Isle of the Dead [Performed by S. Rachmaninoff & Philadelphia Orchestra]. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Rachmaninoff, S. (1999). Isle of the Dead [Performed by Y. Svetlanov & BBC Symphony Orchestra]. London, UK.
Rachmaninoff, S. (2012). Isle of the Dead [Performed by M. Pletnev & Russian National Orchestra]. Moscow, Russia.
rose-engine. (2022, October 27). SIGNALIS. Humble Games.
Schubert, F. (2005). Ständchen D957 [Performed by A. Gastinel, & C. Désert]. Paris, France.
Cicada Sirens, 1000 Eyes , & Schley, T. (2023). SIGNALIS (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK).
Somers-Halls, H. (2013). Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tchaikovsky, P. I. (1984). Swan lake, ballet suite, Op 20: I: Lake in the Moonlight [Performed by M. Rostropovich & Berlin Philharmoniker,]. Berlin, Germany.
Williams, J. (2013). Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition a Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.