Caillois—MPG (v)

Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
Man, Play and Games (1961)

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CHAPTER VII

Simulation and Vertigo

The persistence of games is remarkable. Empires and institutions may disappear, but games survive with the same rules and sometimes even the same paraphernalia. The chief reason is that they are not important and possess the permanence of the insignficant . Herein lies a major mystery. For in order to benefit from this kind of fluid and yet obstinate continuity, they must be like the leaves on the trees which survive from one season to the next and remain identical. ... However, games do not have this hereditary sameness. They are innumerable and changeable. ... Their diffusion does not remain determinate for very long. It is noteworthy that playing with dolls and flying kites, decidely Occidental, were unknown in Europe until the

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eighteenth century. Other games have been prevalent all over the world in one form or another since ancient times. They provide proof of the constancy of human nature on certain levels.

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1. The Interdependence of Games and Culture

Stability and universality are complementary. They seem all the more significant since games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practiced. ... In India, chess was played with four kings. The game spread to medieval Europe. Under the dual influence of the cults of the Virgin and of courtly love, one of the kings was changed to a queen or lady which became the most powerful piece, while the king was limited to the quasi-passive role of figurehead in the game. However, it is important that these vicissitudes have not affected the essential continuity...

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...

It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there. In fact, if games are cultural factors and images, it follows that to a certain degree a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games. ... They cause certain kinds of reactions to be anticipated, and as a consequence the opposite reactions come to be regarded as brutal, snide, subversive, or disloyal. The contrast with games preferred by neighboring peoples does not provide the surest method of determining the origins of psychological incompatibility, but it can provide impressive illustrations, after the fact.

Postmodernity presents a challenge to these speculations, if not merely in showing intra-cultural fragmentation to be possible. And if we're really banking on a transhistorical human nature , then what this means is that fragmentation was always possible before, latently, but it wasn't realized. And so, paradoxically, the "human nature" line leads to the supreme culturalist/environmentalist conclusion: the seeming homogeneity of gaming within cultures and any after the fact support this might furnish for various evaluations of those cultures, really this just suggests that the broader circumstances favored uniformity over plurality; and so in any more plural outcome the generalizations on which such "after the fact" thinking might be based are necessarily more tenuous.

To take an example, it is not without significance that the Anglo-Saxon sport, par excellence, is golf, a game in which a player at any time has the opportunity to cheat at will, but in which the game loses all interest from that point on. It should not be surprising that this may be correlated with the attitude of the taxpayer to the treasury and the citizen to the state.

In this game of cultural correlation, the par excellence is a massive tell. What is the basis for adducing golf as unusually representative? Popularity? Diffusion? A long and stable history? Or is it merely golf's fitness for making this type of comparison to a broader cultural trait which we have already decided, without any appeal whatsoever to games, is a significant cultural trait?

No less instructive an illustration is provided by the Argentine card game of truco in which the whole emphasis is upon guile and even trickery, but trickery that is codified, regulated and obligatory. ...

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...

Together with music , calligraphy, and painting, the Chinese place the games of checkers and chess among the five arts that a scholar must practice . They feel that both these games train the mind to find pleasure in multiple responses, combinations, and surprises that continuously give rise to new situations. Aggressiveness is thus inhibited while the mind finds tranquility, harmony, and joy in contemplating the possibilities. This is without doubt a civilizational trait.

Sobeit declared. But surely these Chinese and their five arts produced at least one Marshall McLuhan.

However, it is clear that such diagnoses are infinitely precarious. Those that seem most obvious must be qualified drastically because of other facts. It is also generally the case that the multiplicity and variety of games simultaneously in favor in a particular culture is very significant.

Yes. Anything else?

And finally, games happen to provide a nonmaterial reward, the pleasant and imaginative result of the illicit tendency disapproved and condemned by law and public opinion. By contrast to wire marionettes, fairylike and graceful, guignols usually reincarnate (as already observed by

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Hirn) ugly and cynical types, inclined to be grotesque and immoral, if not even sacrilegious. The traditional story of Punch and Judy is an example. ... It would surely be a mistake to view this systematic caricature as an ideal reflection of the British audience that applauds these exploits. It does not approve them at all, but its boisterous pleasure provides a catharsis. To acclaim the wicked and triumphant puppet is cheap compensation for the thousands of moral constraints and taboos imposed upon the audience in real life.

And, it must be added, at that point we have pretty much closed the book on the study of Play and Games and moved on to more properly literary territory.

... It may be presumed that the principles which regulate games and permit them to be classified must make their influence felt outside of the domain of play, defined as separate, regulated, and imaginary.

... Just as games are universal, but are not played the same way or to the same extent everywhere—in one place baseball is played more and chess in another—

The previous acknowledgment of multiplicity and variety is already a distant memory.

it is appropriate to inquire whether the principles of play (agôn, alea, mimicry, ilinx), outside of games, are not also inequally diffused through different societies. ...

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... The question is not one of discovering that every society has members who are ambitious, fatalistic, simulate others, or are enfrenzied, and that each society offers unequal chances of success or satisfaction to these types. This is already known. The question is to determine the role played by competition, chance, mimicry, or hysteria in various societies.

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In societies conventionally called primitive as against those described as complex or advanced, there are obvious contrasts that in the latter are not exhausted by the evolution of science, technology, industry, the role of administration, jurisprudence, or archives, theoretical and applied mathematics, the myriad consequences of urbanization and imperialism, and many others with consequences no less formidable or revocable. It is plausible to believe that between these two kinds of society there is a fundamental antagonism of another order, which may be at the

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root of all the others, recapitulating, supporting, and explaining them.

Again, the "paradox" alluded to above: by insisting upon a "human nature" underlying all of this, such drastic and persistent antagonisms among societies become more and not less difficult to account for.

My feeling is there must be some human nature, on one hand, and some margin for adapability on the other; the challenge is in locating the boundaries, not necessaily in saying whether each exists. And if we can't locate the boundaries, it's hard to say much of anything further. In this case, though, we can say that the author has talked a bit out of both sides of his mouth.

I shall describe this antagonism in the following manner: Some primitive societies, which I prefer to call "Dionysian," be they Australian, American, or African, are societies ruled equally by masks and possession, i.e. by mimicry and ilinx. Conversely, the Incas, Assyrians, Chinese, or Romans are orderly societies with offices, careers, codes, and ready-reckoners, with fixed and hierarchical privileges in which agôn and alea, i.e. merit and hereditary, seem to be the chief complementary elements of the game of living. In contrast to the primitive societies, these are "rational." In the first type there are simulation and vertigo or pantomime and ecstasy which assure the intensity and, as a consequence, the cohesion of social life. In the second type, the social nexus consists of compromise, of an implied reckoning between hereditary, which is a kind of chance, and capacity, which presupposes evaluation and competition.

2. Mask and Trance

...the general use of masks in primitive society. An extreme and even a religious importance is attached everywhere to these instruments for metamorphosis. They emerge in festivals—an interregnum of vertigo, effervescence, and fluidity in which everything that symbolizes order in the universe is temporarily abolished so that it can later re-emerge. ... The eruption of phantoms and strange powers terrifies and captivates the individual. He temporarily reincarnates, mimics, and identifies with these fright-

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ful powers and soon, maddened and delirious, really believes that he is the god as whom he disguised himself,... The situation has now become reversed. It is he who inspires fear through his possessing this terrible and inhuman power. It was sufficient for him merely to put on the mask that he himself made,...

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They conform... , as do the performers themselves, because they believe that the actors have become transformed, possessed, and prey to the powers animating them. ...the performers must evoke and excite them, must push their selves to the final debacle that permits the rare intrusion. To this end they employ thousands of artifices, any one of which may be suspect—...

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The festival... is climaxed by shared vertigo. It seems to be the ultimate basis for a society not too stable in other respects. It reinforces a fragile coherence,... ...daily preoccupations have hardly any repercussions upon a rudimentary association in which the division of labor is very slight, and as a consequence each family is expected to provide for its own subsistence. Masks are the true social bond.

A novel thesis. It is not new to postindustrial culture that the true social bond would be in play rather than work. Rather, all that is new is certain forms of play, and perhaps the fact that some of us work less and play more.

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...

One keeps returning to the general problem posed by the

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wearing of masks. It is also associated with the experiences of possession and of communion with ancestors, spirits, and gods. ... No doubt the wearer of the mask is not deceived at the beginning, but he rapidly yields to the intoxication that seizes him. ... Georges Buraud writes: "The individual no longer knows himself. A monstrous shriek rises out of his throat, a cry of beast or god, a superhuman noise, a pure emanation of the force of combat, the passion of procreation, the unlimited magic powers by which he believes himself to be, and is momentarily possessed." ...

It is not merely vertigo, born of blind, uninhibited, and purposeless sharing of cosmic powers or of a dazzling epiphany of bestial divinities soon to return to the shadow world. It is also a simple intoxication with the permeation of terror and anxiety. Above all, these apparitions from the beyond are the forerunner of government. The mask has now become institutionalized. Among the Dogon, for example, a culture that continuously resorts to masks, it has been observed how all of the public life of the group is impregnated with them. It is at the initiation rites of the male societies with their special masks that the basis for collective life and the crude beginnings of political power may be found. The mask is an instrument of secret societies. While disguising the identity of their members, it serves to inspire terror in the laity.

Initiation, the passage rite of puberty, frequently consists of revealing the purely human nature of the mask wearers to the

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novices. From this viewpoint, initiation is an atheistic, agnostic, or negative teaching. It exposes a deception and makes one a party to it. Until then, adolescents were terrorized by masked apparitions. ...

... The threatening and brutal actions of the initiates serve to reinforce the superstitious terror of their victims. In this way, the vertiginous combination of simulation and trance is sometimes deliberately transformed into a mixture of deceit and intimidation. It is at this point that a particular kind of political power emerges.

These associations have varied goals. As may be the case, they specialize in the celebration of a magic rite, dance, or mystery, but they are charged with the repression of adultery, larceny,

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black magic, and poisoning. ... The masked bands thus keep order in society in a way in which vertigo and simulation or their close derivatives, terrifying mimicry and superstitious fear, again emerge, not as fortuitous elements in primitive culture, but as truly basic factors . It should be understood that mask and panic are present in association, inextricably interwoven and occupying a central place,...

... Whether it be cause or effect, each time that an advanced culture succeeds in emerging from the chaotic original, a palpable repression of the powers of vertigo and simulation is verified. They lose their traditional dominance, are pushed to the periphery of public life, reduced to roles that become more and more modern and intermittent, if not clandestine and guilty, or are relegated to the limited and regulated domain of games and fiction where they afford men the same eternal satisfactions, but in sublimated form,...