Raider Camps and the Ethico-Political Imagination of Fallout 3

To revisit the argument of the previous post, Fallout 3 presents a critique of the State and the ability for its power, no matter in whose hands, to lead inevitably to tyranny and unjust violence-unto-death. Surrounded by the debris of a former sovereign superpower, the Enclave's attempt at forceful national reconstruction confirms familiar suspicions: the State’s monopoly on legitimate violence is wielded in order to preserve the existence of the nation as an entity in the face of internal or external perceived or constructed threats.

Despite Fallout's critique of the State form and the “abuse” or expression of power associated with this form, the game is incapable of envisioning an oppositional form of political community. Instead, it marks out the group who lives in a de-centralized manner, the Raiders, as a de facto enemy along the lines of animals and insects. 

The question is: What makes the Raider encampments different than other communities? I would argue the answer is related to the game's over-investment in the ethical in the face of its political sterility. Though their encampments include the usual trappings of life in the Capitol Wasteland, such as soiled mattresses or cardboard bedding, first aid kits, and ammunition boxes, the proximity of empty liquor bottles and mangled corpses hung from crude hooks is intended to provoke the horror of the human turned non-human. That the Raiders are shown to be outside the laws of humanity de-legitimizes not only their “way of life” but also their form of political communality. 

A Raider encampment

In the "Factions and Bestiary" section of Fallout 3's Official Game Guide, the Raiders are described as follows: 

"Chaos and anarchy. Or if you prefer, anarchy and chaos. Raiders revel in both…Most [Raider groups] are no more than a handful of people scraping out a living by preying on anything weaker than them. They have no driving purpose or goal, other than to live to see tomorrow and raise as much hell as possible today."

On the one hand, the Raiders embody the fear of post-apocalyptic lawlessness: marauders who exploit a disintegrated security system for the purposes of subsistence and dispensing random acts of violence or torture for the purposes of entertainment. Covered in grime and adorned with bones, beyond the bounds of reason, the Raiders are the return of the primal at the eve of civilization. 

However, the above quote also captures the ways in which the Raider encampments are formed for the same purposes as other communities around the Wasteland: to sustain life. The notion that a political community originates in securing bare biological need is found as far back as Aristotle. Therefore, I would argue that the Raiders encampments, both sporadically located and officially titled, are political communities as much as Megaton, Rivet City or Underworld, political community here being defined as any location where a group of two or more people cohabit together for the purposes of sustaining life. However, the Raider’s unethical nature circumscribes them from the benefits that come from other sympathetic post-apocalyptic humans, including the benefit to testify to being human. 

As de facto enemies, the Raiders are denied the ability to bare witness. In a game rife with characters, including Super Mutants and ghouls, who are supposed to challenge us to consider the boundary of humanness, in a game where even quasi-humans are given a voice with which to testify to the ongoing trauma of life in the post-apocalypse, in the Raiders we have a group of human beings whose dialogue is relegated to exclamations that function more like the bark of a dog than participation in dialogue. Their discursive silence relegates them to the boundary between human and non-human where they become silent enemies who must be silenced.

My intention is not to say that we should all rush to imitate this group of men and women who live without a leader, hierarchical structure or centralized location. My point is to demonstrate the way in which the Raiders ethical status becomes a judgement on legitimate forms of political life. Instead of the "bad" semi-nomadic encampments, what Fallout finds “good” is other, more recognizable forms of political community: the diverse city, or even the city of people who share a similar sense of identity as slaves, ghouls, etc.

Despite the games thorough critique of the State form, it ultimately fails, in its imaginative space, to legitimize a new form of people living together in an egalitarian manner. Fallout ultimately clings to the register of ethical decision making because it cannot think through its political critique far enough to do the impossible: to use its imaginative space to create a truly novel vision of people living together. With the Raiders, it ushers in the hopeful specter of equality only as another enemy object that threatens the transitory individual.