Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
Man, Play and Games (1961)
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CHAPTER VIII
Competition and Chance
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1. Transition ...how the techniques of vertigo evolved toward methodical control... ...in the Indo-European world, the contrast between the two systems has long been evident in the two opposing forms of power clarified in the works of G. Dumézil. On the one side is the rational—a sovereign god presiding over contracts, exact, ponderous, meticulous, and conservative, a severe and mechanical assurance of norms, laws, and regularity, whose actions are bound to the necessarily predictable and conven-
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tional forms of agôn,... On the other side is the charismatic—also a sovereign god, but inspired and terrible, unpredictable and paralyzing, esctatic, a powerful magician, master of illusion and metamorphosis,...
Between these two aspects of power, the rational and the charismatic, the competition seems to have been a sustained one and not everywhere subject to the same conditions. ...
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During their cryptia, when the Spartan youth may have hunted Helots, it is certain that they led a life of isolation and ambush. They might not be seen or surprised. It was not a question of military preparation; such training was in no way compatible with the hoplites' way of fighting. The youth lives like a wolf and attacks like a wolf;... He steals and kills with impunity, since his victims cannot catch him. The experience entails the dangers and advantages of an initiation. The neophyte wins the power and right to act like a wolf. He is eaten by a wolf and reborn as a wolf. He risks being torn to pieces by wolves, and he in turn is now qualified to devour humans. ...
... Between the sixth and the fourth centuries (B.C.) the supernatural apparition that provoked panic became the wise lawgiver. The sorcerer presiding over initiations became a teacher. In the same way, the wolf-men of Lacedaemonia are no longer fauns possessed by a god, living a wild
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and subhuman life at the age of puberty. They are now a kind of political police sent on punitive expeditions in order to instill fear and obedience into the people.
The traditional ecstatic crisis is calmly adapted to purposes of repression and intimidation. Metamorphoses and trances are now mere memories. The cryptia no doubt remains secret. It is still one of the routine mechanisms of a militaristic republic whose rigid institutions ingeniously combine democracy and despotism. A minority of conquerors, who have already adopted another kind of law, continue to use the old formulae in ruling the subjugated population.
It is a striking and significant development, but it is a special case. At the same time, everywhere in Greece to some extent, orgiastic cults were still resorting to dancing, rhythm, and intoxication... However, vertigo and simulation of this type were suppressed. They are no longer, and have not been for a long time, the central values of the city. They are a survival from remote antiquity.
Again (and again), calling this a survival confounds any appeal to a "human nature." The point is, if certain central values didn't exist (or "survive") we'd have to invent them.
This also implies that the transition from barbarity to civilization is a one-way street, even where it proceeds in fits and starts. It might (just maybe) be worth seeing in it a matter of achievement that must be continually rewon; a toolkit which we can be sure contains what we need but doesn't come with any instruction manual, resulting in plenty of both well-timed barbarity and untimely civilizing.
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The disappearance of the mask, either as a means of transformation leading to ecstasy or as an instrument of political power, was a slow, irregular, and difficult process. The mask was the best symbol of superiority. In masked societies, the key question is whether one is masked and inspires fear or is not masked and is therefore afraid. In a more complex organization, some are afraid and others frighten, according to the degree of initiation. ...... How and why were men led to renounce it? ... I am advancing the following hypothesis,... The system of initiation and masks only functions when there is a precise and constant correlation between the revelation of the secret behind the mask and the right to use it in turn to reach a deifying trance and frighten novices. Knowledge and its application are closely connected. ...it is not possible to come under its influence, or at least to the right degree,... if one knows that it is merely a disguise. Practically speaking, it is not possible to remain unaware of this for long. This gives rise to a permanent fissure in the system, which must be defended against the curiosity of the profane by a whole series of prohibitions and punishments,...
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... It must constantly be protected from fortuitous discovery, indiscreet questions, and sacrilegious hypotheses or explanations. It is inevitable that gradually, without basically losing their sacred character, the fabrication and wearing of masks and disguises would no longer be protected by major interdictions. ...
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The reign of mimicry and ilinx as recognized, honored, and dominant cultural trends is indeed condemned as soon as the mind arrives at the concept of cosmos, i.e. a stable and orderly universe without miracles or transformations. ...
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Number, quantification, and the spirit of precision that they spread, even if incompatible with the spasms and paroxysms of ecstasy and disguise, compensate by allowing free rein to agón and alea as rules of games. At the same time as Greece was moving away from masked societies, replacing the frenzy of the ancient festivals with the serenity of processions and establishing a protocol at Delphi in place of prophetic delirium, it was institutionalizing regulated competition and even drawing lots. ...
Stadium games devise and illustrate a rivalry that is limited, regulated, and specialized. Stripped of any personal feeling of hate or rancor, this new kind of emulation inaugurates a school of loyalty and generosity. At the same time, it spreads the custom of and respect for refereeing. Its civilizing role has often been stressed. In fact, "national" games are present in nearly all the great civilizations. ...
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The evolution of administration also favors the extension of agôn. More and more, the recruitment of officials is accomplished through competitive examinations. The object is to assemble the ablest and most competent, in order to place them in a hierarchy (cursus honorum) or mandarinate (chin) in which advancement is defined by certain norms, fixed and controlled as much as possible by autonomous jurisdiction. Bureaucracy is thus a factor in a type of competition , in which agôn is the principle underlying any administrative, military, university, or judicial career. It penetrates institutions, timidly at first and only in minor posts. The rest long remain dependent upon the caprice of the ruler or the privileges conferred by birth or good fortune. It is no doubt theoretically the case that acceptance is regulated by competition. However, owing to the nature of the tests or the composition of examining boards, the highest grades in the army and important diplomatic or administrative posts often remain the monopoly of an ill-defined caste jealous of its esprit de corps and protective of its solidarity. And yet, democracy progresses precisely through fair competition and equality of law and opportunity, which is sometimes more nominal than real.
In Ancient Greece, the first theorists of democracy resolved the difficulty in perhaps bizarre but impeccable and novel fashion. They maintained that selecting magistrates by lot was an absolutely equalitarian procedure. They viewed elections as a kind of subterfuge or makeshift inspired by aristocrats. Aristotle, especially, reasons in this way. ... In Athens, nearly all magistrates were drawn by lot, with the exception of generals and finance ministers, i.e. technicians. The members of the[110]
Council were drawn by lot, after a qualifying examination, from candidates nominated by the demes. By way of compensation for this, the delegates to the Beotian League were elected. Elections were preferred whenever the territory involved was very large or where a large number of participants necessitated a representative government. The verdict of the lots, expressed by a white bean, was no less esteemed as an egalitarian system. At the same time, it may be regarded as a precaution against the intrigues, maneuvers, or conspiracies of the oligarchs who were difficult to replace. In its beginnings, democracy wavers very instructively between agôn and alea, the two opposing forms of justice.
...contrasting but complementary solutions to a unique problem—that all start out equal. This may be accomplished by lot, provided they agree not to make any use of their natural capacities and provided they consent to a strictly passive attitude. Or, it may be achieved competitively if they are required to use their abilities to the utmost, thus providing indisputable proof of their excellence.
The competitive spirit has indeed become dominant. Good government consists of legally assuring each candidate of an identically equal chance to campaign for votes. One concept of democracy, perhaps more prevalent and plausible, tends to consider the struggle between political parties as a kind of sports rivalry, exhibiting most of the characteristics of combat in the arena, lists or ring—i.e. limited stakes, respect for one's opponent and the referee's decision, loyalty, and genuine co-operation between the rivals, once a verdict has been reached.
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2. Merit and Chance
...From a certain viewpoint, the infinite variety of political systems shows a preference for one or the other of the two opposing orders of superiority. ... Some try to perpetuate original inequalities as much as possible by means of caste or closed class systems. Others are devoted, on the contrary, to accelerating the circulation of elites,...
Neither of these political extremes is absolute. However oppressive the privileges associated with name, wealth, or some other advantage of birth, there always exists, however infini-
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tesimally, a chance for audacity, ambition, and valor. Conversely, in more equalitarian societies where the hereditary in any form would not openly be admitted, it is hard to imagine that an accident of birth or the position of one's father would be without effect upon the son's career or would not automatically facilitate it. ...
In fact, in all societies to varying degree, as soon as they have become more complex, there is the opposition between wealth and poverty, glory and obscurity, power and slavery. ... Inheritance continues to weigh upon everybody like a mortgage that cannot be paid off—the laws of chance that reflect the continuity of nature and the inertia of society. The purpose of legislation is to counterbalance these effects. ... However, it is obvious that the competitors are not equal in opportunity to make a good start.Several generations are sometimes necessary for the underprivileged to catch up to the rich. The promised rules for true agôn are flouted. ... The origins of univerity youth have been studied statistically as a good means of measuring the fluidity of the class system. It is impressively
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confirmed how even in socialist countries, despite indisputable progress, there is still social stratification.
To be sure, there are... all kinds of encouragement for ability. However, this is mere homage or even palliation... Reality must be faced and the problem understood in societies that pretend to be equalitarian. Then it is clear that on the whole the only effective competition is between people of the same level, origin, and milieu. ...
The principles of an equalitarian society certainly do not include the obtaining of rights and advantages through chance, for the latter are proper only to caste systems. However, even if many, rigorous mechanisms are designed to place everyone on his uniquely proper rung of the social ladder and to favor only true merit and proved ability, even here chance persists.
All of this jibes well with Lasch's rejection of "social mobility," which is bound to strike many readers as a de facto endorsement of
caste systems
but at least has the strength of seeking to control only what we can control; e.g., in this case, something like "equality before the law" as against true social equality.
That is a very "conservative" position, I suppose. But it does seem equally transparent to me that we've never really achieved "equality before the law" in the USA, and the Conservative denial of this remains baffling.
First, it is found in the very alea of heredity, which distributes abilities and defects unequally. And it can only be chance that in fact indubitably favors the candidate who is asked only the question that he has carefully studied, while it compromises the success of the unlucky one who is questioned on just the very point that he has omitted. Thus, in the very heart of agôn, an aleatory element is suddenly introduced.... Similarly, in card games, winning sanctions a supe-
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riority composed of the cards dealt the player plus his knowledge. Alea and agôn are therefore contradictory but complementary. They are opposed in permanent conflict, but united in a basic alliance.
Both as a matter of principle and institutionally, modern society tends to enlarge the domain of regulated competition, or merit, at the expense of birth and inheritance, or chance,... However, the results of their efforts are still meager and deceptive...Until something better turns up, everyone old enough to reflect upon the situation readily understands that it is too late... Each man is conditioned by environment. ... Chance is courted because hard work and personal qualifications are powerless to bring such success about.
In addition many people do not count on receiving anything much on personal merit alone . They are well aware that others are abler, more skillful, stronger, more intelligent, more hard-working, more ambitious, healthier, have a better memory, and are more pleasing or persuasive than they are. Also, being conscious of their inferiority, they do not trust in exact, impartial, and rational comparisons . They therefore turn to chance, seeking a discriminatory principle that might be kinder to them. Since they despair of winning in contests of agôn, they resort to lotteries or any games of chance, where even the least endowed, stupidest, and most handicapped, the unskilled and the indolent may be equal to the most resourceful and perspicacious as a result of the miraculous blindness of a new kind of justice.
Dare I say there is more than a hint of this to the Scrabble scene.
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Under these conditions, alea again seems a necessary compensation for agôn , and its natural complement. ...it leaves hope in the dispossessed that free competition is still possible in the lowly stations in life, which are necessarily more numerous. That is why, to the degree that alea of birth loses its traditional supremacy and regulated competition becomes dominant, one sees a parallel development and proliferation of a thousand secondary mechanisms designed to bring sudden success out of turn to the rare winner.
Or maybe lotteries are just a really good racket?
People do seem to be fascinated by the spectacle of sudden success out of turn . That some projection is involved seems too obvious to dispute. Still, it can't be discounted that this is, for some perhaps, pure spectacle with little projection. This becomes more plausible as winning the lottery becomes more dangerous for the winner. But that aside, it seems to me always a bit tenuous to use mass appeal and mass consumption to validate an ascription of deep psychology, the same here as with art and entertainment proper.
Games of chance serve this purpose just as do numerous tests, games of chance in disguise, which are commonly publicized as competitions even though they are essentially gambles of a simpler complex character. ...
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... in 1955 the French spent 115 billions merely on state-controlled games of chance. Of this total, the gross receipts of the Loterie Nationale accounted for 46 billions, about 1,000 francs per capita. The same year, about 25 billions were distributed in prizes. ...
Games of chance are not organized in all countries as gigantic lotteries on a national scale. When deprived of their official character and state support, they seem to diminish rapidly in importance. ...
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The existence of large cities whose reason for being and almost sole support lies in games of chance is no doubt an expression of the passion to gamble. Moreover, it is not in these abnormal cities that the instinct is strongest. ...
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State lotteries, casinos, hippodromes, and pari-mutuels of all kinds are subsumed under pure alea, following the mathematical laws of probability.
In fact, when the general expenses of administration are deducted, the seemingly disproportionate profit is exactly proportionate to the amount risked by each player.
***over 100 prize***
A more remarkable modern innovation consists of what I shall arbitrarily call disguised lotteries —i.e. those not requiring money to be risked and seeming to reward talent, learning, ingenuity, or any other type of merit, thus naturally escaping general notice or legal sanction. Some grand prizes of a literary character may truly bring fortune and glory to a writer, at least for several years. These contests stimulate thousands of others that are of little significance but which somehow trade upon the prestige of the more important competition. ... There are no limits to all this. Radiologists have even selected a girl (a Miss Lois Conway, 18 years of age) as Miss Skeleton, proved by X-rays to have the prettiest bony structure. ...[119]
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3. Identification
At this point a new fact emerges, the significance and impact of which it is important to understand. Identification is a degraded and diluted form of mimicry, the only one that can survive in a world dominated by the combination of merit and chance. The majority fail in competition or are ineligible to compete, having no chance to enter or succeed. Every soldier may carry a marshal's baton in his knapsack and be the most worthy to bear it, except that he may never become a marshal commanding batallions of mere soldiers. Chance, like merit, selects only a favored few.
The mere fact of this calls into question not merely the various conceits to meritocracy but in fact the very construction and meaningfulness of the concept of merit.
With so much "merit" going unrewarded (often enough right alongside the crying need for it), we can see retrospectively that our working definition seldom enables us to identify noncontroversial instances of it; the only such instances we have, rather, are of those favored few . Presumably there are others. Many others. But we cannot (necessarily) locate them.
Or maybe he just means that "merit" is unevenly distributed, period, no matter how we define it or how this might make us feel. It is possessed in degrees rather than absolutely, yet only a "favored few" are rewarded and subsequently become identifiable as meritorious. Ours is therefore a "winner take all" meritocracy, which mother wit and formal economic thought alike would tell us is not a meritocracy at all, since too many people (the majority) are not being rewarded at all for what merit they do possess.
The majority remain frustrated. Everyone wants to be first and in law and justice has the right to be. However, each one knows or suspects that he will not be, for the simple reason that by definition only one may be first. He may therefore choose to win indirectly , through identification with someone else, which is the only way in which all can triumph simultaneously without effort or chance of failure.
I suspect this has more to do with the appeal of sports than does any surface-level "content."
From this is derived the worship of stars and heroes, especially characteristic of modern society. This cult may in all justice be regarded as inevitable in a world in which sports and the movies are so dominant. Yet there is in this unanimous and spontaneous homage a less obvious but no less persuasive motive. The star and the hero present fascinating images of the only great success that can befall the more lowly and poor, if lucky. An unequaled devotion is given the meteoric apotheosis of someone who succeeds only through his personal resources—
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muscles, voice, or charm, the natural, inalienable weapons of the man without social influence.
The irony being that this wild popularity has, with time, undone the adequacy of mere personal resources . Rather, spectator money has raised the stakes to where these talents also are intensely cultivated and "merit" reinscribes itself.
Consecration is rare and in part even unpredictable. It does not climax a conventional career. It is the reward of an extraordinary and mysterious convergence in which are compounded one's being magically gifted from infancy on, perseverance that no obstacle could discourage, and the ultimate test presented by the precarious but decisive opportunity met and seized without hesitation. The idol, for one, has visibly triumphed in an insidious, implacable, and confused competition, where success must come quickly—for these resources, which the most humble may have inherited and which may be the precarious lot of the poor, are time-bound; beauty fades, the voice cracks, muscles become flabby, and joints stiffen. Moreover, who does not at least vaguely dream of the fantastic possibility, which seems so near, of reaching the improbable heights of luxury and glory? Who does not desire to become a star or a champion? However, how many among this multitude of dreamers are discouraged by the first obstacles?
Good question. It is a question which Ericsson answers too breezily with the study of youth chess clubs. Therein he finds that initial discouragement is a common experience of many who later, through effort, become the best players. But it is unclear here and elsewhere whether he has really looked all that hard for those who gave up due to this initial discouragement. Really, how would he be able to find them? Is this not a classic Talebian problem of "silent evidence" going unaccounted for?
How many come to grips with them? How many really think of some day braving them? That is why many prefer to triumph vicariously, through heroes of film or fiction, or better still, through the intervention of real and sympathetic characters like stars and champions. ...
There is doubtless no combination more inextricable than that of agôn and alea. Merit such as each might claim is combined with the chance of an unprecedented fortune, in order to seemingly assure the novice a success so exceptional as to be miraculous. Here mimicry intervenes. Each one participates indirectly in an inordinate triumph which may happen to him, but which deep inside him he knows can befall only one in millions.
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In this way, everyone yields to the illusion and at the same time dispenses with the effort that would be necessary if he truly wished to try his luck and succeed.
This superficial and vague, but permanent, tenacious, and universal identification constitutes one of the essential compensatory mechanisms of democratic society. The majority have only this illusion to give them diversion, to distract them from a dull, monotonous, and tiresome existence. Such an effort , or perhaps I ought to say such alienation , even goes so far as to encompass personal gestures or to engender a kind of contagious hysteria suddenly possessing almost all the younger generation. This fascination is also encouraged by the press, movies, radio, and television. ...some are inconsolable when the stars die and refuse to survive them. These impassioned devotions exclude neither collective frenzy nor suicide waves.It is obviously not the athlete's prowess nor the performer's art that provides an explanation of such fanaticism, but rather a kind of general need for identifying with the champion or the star. ...
An observation that would be right at home in Rank or Becker.
The star symbolizes success personified, victory and recompense for the crushing and sordid inertia of daily life,... This exaltation, which seemingly consecrates the hero, flouts the[123]
established hierarchy in brilliantly and drastically obliterating the fate imposed upon all by the human condition. One also imagines such a career to be somewhat suspicious, impure, or irregular. The residue of envy underlying admiration does not fail to see in it a triumph compounded of ambition, intrigue, impudence, and publicity.
Kings are exempt from such suspicion, but their status, far from contradicting social inequality, on the contrary provides the most striking illustration of it. For one sees the press and public excited over the persons of monarchs, court ceremony, love affairs of princesses, and abdication of rulers, no less than over film stars.
Hereditary majesty, its legitimacy guaranteed by generations of absolute power, evokes an image of a symmetrical grandeur which derives from the historic past a more stable type of prestige than that conferred by a sudden and transitory success. ...no effort, desire, or choice is even required—merely the pure verdict of absolute alea. Identification with them is therefore minimal. ...
...the popular imagination needs to bring the one from whom it is separated by insurmountable barriers as close as possible to the common level. People desire that he be simple, sensitive,... ...simplest pleasures are forbidden to him, and it is stressed repeatedly that he is not free
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to love, that he owes himself to the crown, etiquette, and affairs of state. ......
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Even an equalitarian society leaves the lowly with small hope of rising above their disappointing existence. ... While the champion and the star illustrate the dazzling successes possible even to the most underprivileged, despotic court protocol is a reminder that the lives of monarchs are only happy to the degree that they retain something of the common touch, thus confirming that not too great an advantage accrues from even the most inordinate endowments of fortune.
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... The new social game, as has been seen, is defined in terms of the debate between birth and merit,... ...while society rests upon universal equality and proclaims so, only the very few inherit or achieve a place at the top, and it is all too clear that no others can reach the top except through an inconceivable revolution. From such a stratified society arises the subterfuge of identification.
What about the identification of the unambitious with, say, Donald Duck? Could these identifications, which seem (motivatedly) to elide the achievement-based new social game , could these therefore be determined by this "game" nonetheless?
... Mimicry is diffused and corrupted. Deprived of the mask, it no longer leads to possession and hypnosis, merely to the vainest of dreams. ... Although the mask is no longer worn, except on rare occasions, and has no utility, mimicry, infinitely diffused, serves as a support or a balance for the new norms governing society.
At the same time vertigo, which has been even more displaced, no longer exercises, except in the corrupt form of alcohol and drugs, a permanent and powerful attraction. Like the mask or travesty it is no longer, properly speaking, play, i.e. regulated, circumscribed activity separated from real life. These foregoing episodic roles certainly do not exhaust the virulence of the forces of simulation and trance, which are now subdued. That is why they erupt in hypocritical and perverse form, in the midst of a world which inhibits and normally does not recognize them.
...It would certainly be unreasonable to conclude, in the attempt to prove a definite hypothesis, that it was ever sufficient for a
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group to challenge the ascendance of the mimicry-ilinx combination and substitute for it a universe in which merit and chance, agôn and alea, would rule. As to this we can only speculate. But that this rupture accompanies the decisive revolution and is involved in correctly describing it, even where its effects are almost imperceptible, can hardly be denied;...
