Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
Man, Play and Games (1961)
[43]
CHAPTER IV
The Corruption of Games
...
... In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the inference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.
At this point, it may be of interest to ask what becomes of games when the sharp line dividing their ideal rules from the diffuse and insidious laws of daily life is blurred. They certainly cannot spread beyond the playing field (chess- or checkerboard, arena, racetrack, stadium, or stage) or time that is reserved for them, and which ends as inexorably as the closing of a parenthe-
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sis. They will necessarily have to take quite different, and on occasion doubtlessly unexpected, forms.
In addition, a strict and absolute code governs amateur players, whose prior assent seems like the very condition of their participation in an isolated and entirely conventional activity. But what if the convention is no longer accepted ... Suppose the isolation is no longer respected? The forms or the freedom of play surely can no longer survive. All that remains is the tyrannical and compelling psychological attitude that selects one kind of game to play rather than another.
Again, this is slightly Laschian. Compare to The Revolt of the Elites [p. 87; "Crisis of Competence," 3 dec 2021]
[87] The call for models of heroism "common to all" seems to threaten the pluralism of ethical commitments that democracy is obliged to protect. In the absence of common standards, however, tolerance becomes indifference, and cultural pluralism degenerates into an aesthetic spectacle... However, our neighbors themselves, as individuals, are never held up to any kind of judgment. ... The questions that allegedly divide us beyond hope of compromise turn out to be lifestyle questions, in the jargon of the day. ... In this context, the question that really matters—How should I live?—also becomes a matter of taste...
... In agôn, the player relies only upon himself and his utmost efforts; in alea, he counts on everything except himself, submitting to the powers that elude him; in mimicry, he imagines that he is someone else, and he invents an imaginary universe; in ilinx, he gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of conscience.Typo?!If play consists in providing formal, ideal, limited, and escapist satisfaction for these powerful drives, what happens when every convention is rejected? When the universe of play is no longer tightly closed? When it is contaminated by the real world in which every act has inescapable consequences? Corresponding to each of the basic categories there is a specific perversion which results from the absence of both restraint and protection. The rule of instinct again becoming absolute, the tendency to interfere with the isolated, sheltered, and neutralized kind of play spreads to daily life and tends to subordinate it to its own needs, as much as possible. What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety.
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The principle of play has become corrupted. It is now necessary to take precautions against cheats and professional players , a unique product of the contagion of reality. Basically, it is not a perversion of play, but a sidetracking derived from one of the four primary impulses governing play. The situation is not unique. It occurs whenever the specified instinct does not encounter, in an appropriate game, the discipline and refuge that anchor it, or whenever it does not find gratification in the game.
The cheat is still inside the universe of play. If he violates the rules of the game, he at least pretends to respect them. He tries to influence them. He is dishonest, but hypocritical.
He thus, by his attitude, safeguards and proclaims the validity of the conventions he violates, because he is dependent upon others obeying the rules. If he is caught, he is thrown out. The universe of play remains intact. Neither does the professional player change the nature of the game in any way. To be sure, he himself does not play, but merely practices a profession . The nature of competition or the performance is hardly modified if the athletes or comedians are professionals who play for money rather than amateurs who play for pleasure. The difference concerns only the players.For professional boxers, bicycle riders, or actors, agôn or mimicry has ceased being a recreation intended as a relaxation from fatigue or a relief from the monotony of oppressive and exhausting work. It is their very work, necessary to their subsistence, a constant and absorbing activity, replete with obstacles and problems, from which they properly find relaxation by playing at a game to which they are not contracted.
Yep. But how would we know if the same were not true of the oppressed, exhausted worker? What is the basis, really, for the ascription of relaxation ?
For the actor also , a theatrical performance is mere simulation . He puts on make-up and costume, plays and recites. But when the curtain falls, and the lights go on, he returns to reality . The separation of the two universes remains absolute. ... As soon as the contest ends, the audience runs for the exit. The champion returns to his routine responsibilities,...
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... As soon as he leaves the stadium, velodrome, or ring, the perfect and precise rivalries in which he has pitted his strength under conditions as artificial as possible give way to rivalries that are formidable in quite another way. ...the comedian off the stage, is now again part of the common lot, removed from the closed-off space and the privileged time ruled by the strict, gratuitous, and indisputable laws of play.
Outside of the arena , after the gong strikes, begins the true perversion of agôn , the most pervasive of all the categories. It appears in every conflict untempered by the rigor or spirit of play. Now competition is nothing but a law of nature. In society it resumes its original brutality , as soon as it finds a loophole in the system of moral, social, and legal constraints, which have limits and conventions comparable to those of play. That is why mad, obsessive ambition, applied to any domain in which the rules of the game and free play are not respected, must be denounced as a clear deviation which in this case restores the original situation. There is no better example of the civilizing role of play than the inhibitions it usually places upon natural avidity. A good player must be able to contemplate with objectivity, detachment, and at least an appearance of calm, the unlucky results of even the most sustained effort or the loss of large sums. The referee's decision is accepted in principle even if unjust. The corruption of agôn begins at the point where no referee or decision is recognized.
Clearly aimed at certain Social Darwinist theories, and especially at the reductionism of "Greed is good." Not even mere natural avidity can be good in and of itself, to say nothing of "ambition" or "greed."
As for rules and their enforcement, if compliance is (generically) the highest priority, there is a certain wisdom in letting the rules emerge from necessity rather than imposing them out of desire. Too many people just dislike following rules, dislike it enough to be unamenable to being asked nicely. So necessity is the only safe bet. But that means (probably) not getting what you want.
And as for the civilizing role of play , again (and again) we are baited here with the Sociologist's classical resolution of a chicken-or-egg proposition cleanly and totally in favor of the egg. It is no less plausible that this ideal form of play emerges only when certain broader "civilizing" processes are already afoot. But that direction of travel is a less appealing conversation starter, apparently.
In games of chance , there is a comparable corruption of the principle as soon as the player ceases to respect chance , that is, when he no longer views the laws of chance as impersonal neutral power , without heart or memory, a purely mechanical effect. With superstition, the corruption of alea is born.
This is Scrabble.
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...
Such an attitude is only aggravated by games of chance. It is found to be quite prevalent, even if subconscious. It is not restricted to the habitués of casinos or racetracks and the purchasers of lottery tickets. The regular publication of horoscopes by daily and weekly newspapers transforms each day and each week into a kind of promise or menace for their readers,...
...
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... The figures are quite revealing: 100,000 Parisians consult 6,000 diviners, seers, or fortunetellers daily. According to the Institut national de Statistique, 34 billion francs are spent annually in France on astrologers, magicians, and other frauds. In the United States, for astrology alone, a 1953 investigation counted 30,000 professional establishments, twenty specialized magazines with a circulation of 500,000 readers, and 2,000 periodicals that publish horoscopes. ...
Numerous indications of the association between games of chance and divination are easily found. One of the most conspicuous and immediate is that the very same cards used by players in trying their luck may also be used by prophets to predict the future. Seers only use special games in order to enhance their prestige. Ordinary dinner plates may be used, newly inscribed with naive legends, impressive illustrations, or traditional allegories. At every point there is a quite natural transition from chance to superstition.
As for the avarice today observed in the pursuit of good fortune, it probably compensates for the continuous tension involved in modern competition. Whoever despairs of his own resources is led to trust in destiny. Excessively rigorous competition discourages the timid and tempts them to rely on external powers. ...[49]
...
Superstition therefore seems to be a perversion , i.e. the application to reality of one of the principles of play , alea, which causes one to expect nothing of himself and leaves all to chance. The corruption of mimicry follows a parallel course. It is produced when simulation is no longer accepted as such , when the one who is disguised believes that his role, travesty, or mask is real . He no longer plays another. Persuaded that he is the other, he behaves as if he were, forgetting his own self. The loss of his real identity is a punishment for his inability to be content with merely playing a strange personality. It is properly called alienation.
So, the "effect on the players themselves" is alienation. What about the spectators? They too can become convinced that theatrical mimicry is real.
Conventionally, to say what I have just said is to court absurdity. In the case of live theater, we can assume that no one gets confused as to what is "real" and what is staged. McLuhan's various tribespeople are, conventionally if not in point of fact, rhetorical rather than representative examples. Were such a person actually to show up in a Broadway theater audience, we could discuss that through an entirely different lens than the one I am looking through here.
Rather, with specific regard to the culturally initiated, what I mean is that it is very difficult to be treated to a highly topical theatrical presentation (as most of them quite intentionally and explicitly are nowadays) and not be subject to some creeping reinterpretation and reformation of viewpoint. The only way this is possible, actually, is if you are so unengaged by the performance that you for all intents haven't experienced the performance at all. If you can remember it, you almost certainly will be influenced by it.
Whether this influence bears any resemblance to that intended by writers, directors, designers, actors, or critics is another question entirely; as is that of your conscious thoughts about your having been influenced. It may be (I would say it usually is) very difficult to say much concretely about the abstract reality of all of this; and that is why nothing people do say about it is worth a damn aside from itself forming the basis of a certain kind of "play" which even the hardheaded realists among these various metiers seem to enjoy, perhaps actually to need.
The point of insisting on all of this is not merely to play the hardheaded realist role for its own sake. The point is to argue that this "creeping reformation" can fairly be categorized as a corruption of play, wherein
simulation is no longer accepted as such,
and wherein
the one who is disguised believes that his role, travesty, or mask is real
Just as the actor's
inability to be content with merely playing a strange personality.leads to
The loss of his real identityas
a punishment,
avid consumers of theatrical and narrative didacticism
lose
the messages they aspire to receive and the messages they think they receive in the shuffle of "creeping reformation," though if you ask them they will insist nothing of the sort could be occurring.
This reception-side analog to "the effect on the players themselves" just as well
is properly called alienation..
Here, too, play is a protection from danger . The actor's role is sharply defined by the dimensions of the stage and the duration of the spectacle. Once he leaves the magic area, the fantasy ends and the most vainglorious histrionics and the most eloquent performances are brutally constrained by the very necessity of passing from the dressing-room of the theater to the resumption of his own personality.
And again, the same may be said of topical instrumentalization: when the movie or the book or the show shapes our construction of reality, we are in danger of corrupting whatever view we have formed otherwise; whereas the atopical play of aesthetics protects us.
...Alienation occurs toward the end of profound and continuous labor. It takes place when there is no sharp dividing line between fantasy and reality, when the subject has gradually donned a second, chimerical, and all-pervasive personality which claims exorbitant rights with respect to a reality with which it is of necessity incompatible .
As good a description of topical entertainment as any.
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...
As for ludus and paidia, which are not categories of play but ways of playing, they pass into ordinary life as invariable opposites, e.g. the preference for cacaphony over a symphony, scribbling over the wise application of the laws of perspective.
Fifty-some pages in, we finally get the obligatory swipe at modernism.
It could be that there is no such thing as a preference for disorder, rather that some people find the order where others find only cacophony .
Their continuous opposition arises from the fact that a concerted enterprise, in which various expendable resources are well utilized, has nothing in common with purely disordered movement for the sake of paroxysm.
Admittedly, paroxysm does seem to be the extent of many people's interest in modernist works. But not all modernism is maximalism. There are distinctively modernist techniques which deploy limited expendable resources in ways that are oblique (or yes, outright opposed to) classical and commercial notions of order.
What we set out to analyze was the corruption of the principles of play, or preferably, their free expansion without check or convention . It was shown that such corruption is produced in identical ways . It entails consequences which seem to be inordinately serious. Madness or intoxication may be sanctions that are disproportionate to the simple overflow of one of the play instincts out of the domain in which it can spread without irreparable harm. In contrast, the superstitions engendered by deviation from alea seem benign. Even more, when the spirit of competition freed from rules of equilibrium and loyalty is added to unchecked ambition, it seems to be profitable for the daring one who is abandoned to it. Moreover, the temptation to guide one's behavior by resort to remote powers and magic symbols in automatically applying a system of imaginary correspondences does not aid man to exploit his basic abilities more efficiently. He becomes fatalistic. He becomes incapable of deep appreciation of relationships between phenomena. Perseverance and
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trying to succeed despite unfavorable circumstances are discouraged.
Transposed to reality, the only goal of agôn is success. The rules of courteous rivalry are forgotten and scorned. They seem merely irksome and hypocritical conventions. Implacable competition becomes the rule. ...
Table II
AGÔN Cultural Forms Found at the Margins of the Social Order Sports Institutional Forms Integrated into Social Life Corruption (Competition) Economic competition Competitive examinations Violence Will to power Trickery ALEA (Chance) Lotteries Casinos Hippodromes Pari-mutuels Speculation on stock market Superstition Astrology, etc. MIMICRY (Simulation) Carnival Theater Cinema Hero-worship Uniforms Ceremonial etiquette Alienation Split personality ILINX (Vertigo) Mountain climbing Skiing Tightrope walking Speed Professions requiring control of vertigo Alcoholism and drugs [55]
...
Any corruption of the principles of play means the abandonment of those precarious and doubtful conventions that it is always permissible, if not profitable, to deny, but the arduous adoption of which is a milestone in the development of civilizaton. If the principles of play in effect correspond to powerful instincts (competition, chance, simulation, vertigo), it is readily understood that they can be positively and creatively gratified only under ideal and circumscribed conditions , which in every case prevail in the rules of play.
Is it possible to hang onto this part while reserving some skepticism for the next two assertions?
Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all instincts, these basic impulses can hardly lead to any but disastrous consequences.
But they can lead to disastrous consequences through play also. The whole previous section has been devoted to explaining how this happens. Do people who generally have trouble following rules really learn how to do this by playing? Or do they have the same trouble playing that they have in other areas of life?
Games discipline instincts and institutionalize them. For the time that they afford formal and limited satisfaction, they educate, enrich, and immunize the mind against their virulence. At the same time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to the enrichment and the establishment of various patterns of culture.
The problem with mere formal and limited satisfaction is that its powers of education, enrichment, and immunization are also limited in direct proportion. So while evidence can undoutedly be found, somewhere, for such top-down effects, it can hardly be assumed that we have the right amount just because we have some, somewhere.
I would propose that corruption has found a way to survive and thrive throughout some drastic changes in various patterns of culture . This alone is grounds for skepticism of the above.
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