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.

...

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.

...

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,...

...

...

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,...

Caillois—MPG (iv)

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

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CHAPTER V

Toward a Sociology Derived
from Games

For a long time the study of games has been scarcely more than the history of games. ... There was no thought of attributing the slightest cultural value to them. ... Thus, weapons fallen into disuse become toys... [or] originally were magical devices. A number of other games are equally based upon lost beliefs or reproduce in a vacuum rites

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that are no longer significant. ...

Huizinga, however, in his key work Homo Ludens, published in 1938, defends the very opposite thesis, that culture is derived from play. ...

A truly opposite thesis would not merely invert the absolutism of the first but rather argue a more nuanced line.

The two theses are almost entirely contradictory.

I would say instead that they are complementary.

... In one case games are systematically viewed as a kind of degradation of adult activities that are transformed into meaningless distractions when they are no longer taken seriously. In the other case, the spirit of play is the source of the fertile conventions that permit the evolution of culture.

This sounds very...complementary.

...

I believe that it is possible to resolve the contradiction. The spirit of play is essential to culture, but games and toys are historically the residues of culture.

Yes.

Misunderstood survivals of a past era or culture traits borrowed from a strange culture and deprived of their original meaning seem to function when re-

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moved from the society where they were originally established.

In other words, when they are appropriated.

Appropriation can be good. I would say it is essential, actually. Much "appropriated" culture not only seems to function when detached from its original meaning ; it also fills new roles and meet new needs, some (not all) of which are as important (while probably also differently important) to the appropriator.

Of course the devil is in the details...

They are now merely tolerated, whereas in the earlier society they were an integral part of its basic institutions, secular or sacred.

What could be so great about being merely tolerated as opposed to being an integral part ? Doesn't everybody want and need to be a part of something?

Of course we do, but people are not games, nor are they symphonies, nor hair styles. The only commonality among such cultural productions is that they can be appropriated.

Not everything about a person can be appropriated. When who you are is your hair or your symphony, though, you could be in a tough spot, or you could be reveling in that imitation which is the sincerest form of flattery. The latter would be more generous towards all the other people who think they want to be that hair or that symphony too, though admittedly that is a pretty weird thing to want in the first place.

At that time, to be sure, they were not games, in the sense that one speaks of children's games, but they already were part of the essence of play, as correctly defined by Huizinga. Their social function changed, not their nature. The transfer or degradation that they underwent stripped them of their political and religious significance. But this decadence only reveals, when isolated, what is basically the structure of play .

So, we can be thankful for the revelation. But it can come only at the cost of decadence ?

... The first and no doubt the most remarkable example is the mask—a sacred object universally present, whose transformation into a plaything perhaps marks a prime mutation in the history of civilization. ... The greasy pole is related to myths of heavenly conquest, football to the conflict over the solar globe by two opposing phratries. ... [etc., etc.]

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...

...

Games of chance have been associated with divination in the same way games of strength or skill or riddle contests had probative value in the enthronement rituals for an important responsibility or ministry. The real game is often sadly bereft of its sacred origins. ...

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...

...

... there is hardly a game which may not appear to specialized historians as the last stage in the gradual decline of a solemn and decisive activity that used to be tied to the prosperity or destiny of individuals or communities. I ask myself nevertheless whether such a doctrine, which persists in regarding every game as the ultimate and humiliating metamorphosis of a serious activity, is not fundamentally erroneous , to wit, a pure and simple optical illusion which does not resolve the problem.

... we are not at all certain that prehistoric children might not have been playing with bows, slingshots, and pea-shooters "for fun" at the same time that fathers used them "for real,"...

This observation is no less valid for the sacred than for the profane. Kachinas are semidivinities that are the principal object of piety among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. This does not prevent the same adults, who revere and reincarnate them in the course of masked dances, from making dolls resembling them for the amusement of their children. ...

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...

...

There are grounds for suspecting that children's games are not a degradation of serious activities, but rather that two different levels are simultaneously involved. ... Today children play soldiers without armies' having disappeared. ...

To pass to adult activities, tournaments are games, wars are not. ...one can be killed in a tournament, but only accidentally,...

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...roulette is a game, but playing the market is not, even though the risk is no less. The difference is that in the former case it is forbidden to influence the outcome, whereas in the latter there is no limit on manipulation except the fear of scandal or prison.

Through this approach, it is seen that play is not at all a meaningless residue of a routine adult occupation, although it eventually perpetuates a counterfeit of adult activity after the latter has become obsolete. Above all, play is a parallel, independent activity, opposed to the acts and decisions of ordinary life by special characteristics appropriate to play . These I have tried to define and analyze at the outset.

...it must not be forgotten that adults themselves continue to play complicated, varied, and sometimes dangerous games, which are still viewed as games. Although fate and life may involve one in comparable activities, nevertheless play differs from these even when the player takes life less seriously than the game to which he is addicted. For the game remains separate, closed off, and, in principle, without important repercussions upon the stability and continuity of collective and institutional existence.

The many writers who persist in viewing games, especially children's games, as pleasant and insignificant activities, with little meaning or influence, have not sufficiently observed that play and ordinary life are constantly and universally antagonistic to each other . Such an error of perspective does have a moral. It surely shows that the history of games or their evolution through the ages —the destiny of a liturgy that ends in a roundelay, a magic instrument or object of worship that becomes a toy— is as remote from revealing their nature as are the scholars who have discovered these enduring and hazardous connections.

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In the end, the question of knowing which preceded the other, play or the serious, is a vain one . To explain games as derived from laws, customs, and liturgies, or in reverse to explain jurisprudence, liturgy, and the rules for strategy, syllogisms, or esthetics as a derivation of play, are complementary, equally fruitful operations provided they are not regarded as mutually exclusive .

This point deserves emphasis. Still, it is secondary.

What is primary? The explanation du jour cannot be fruitful if it is not true. It cannot be, as the author himself puts it above, a pure and simple optical illusion .

This challenge remains even for bidirectional, dynamic theories of play. Unless of course "truth content" or "explanatory power" is incidental to the purported need for an explanation in the first place, as it occasionally seems to be.

The structures of play and reality are often identical, but the respective activities that they subsume are not reducible to each other in time or place. They always take place in domains that are incompatible.

...when a culture evolves, what had been an institution may become degraded. A once-essential contract becomes a purely formal convention to be respected or neglected at will, because abiding by it is now an extra responsibility, a luxurious and charming survival, without repercussions upon the actual functoning of society. Gradually this reverence deteriorates to the level of simply a rule of the game. ... However, it must be remembered that the latter is ruled absolutely, without resistance, and like an imaginary world without matter or substance. In the confused, inextricable universe of real, human relationships, on the other hand, the action of given principles is never isolated, sovereign, or limited in advance. It

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entails inevitable consequences and possesses a natural propensity for good or evil.

In both cases, moreover, the same qualities can be identified:

The need to prove one's superiority
The desire to challenge, make a record, or merely overcome
an obstacle
The hope for and the pursuit of the favor of destiny
Pleasure in secrecy, make-believe, or disguise
Fear or inspiring of fear
The search for repetition and symmetry, or in contrast, the joy
of improvising, inventing, or infinitely varying solutions
Solving a mystery or riddle
The satisfaction procured from all arts involving contrivance
The desire to test one's strength, skill, speed, endurance, equi-
librium, or ingenuity
Conformity to rules and laws, the duty to respect them, and
the temptation to circumvent them
And lastly, the intoxication, longing for ecstasy, and desire for
voluptuous panic

These attitudes and impulses, often incompatible with each other, are found in the unprotected realm of social life, where acts normally have consequences, no less than in the marginal and abstract world of play. But they are not equally necessary, do not play the same role, and do not have the same influence.

In addition, it is impossible to keep them in proper balance. They largely exclude one another. Where the ones are honored, the others are of necessity decried. Depending upon circumstances, one obeys the law or heeds the voice of unreason, relies on reason or inspiration, esteems violence or diplomacy, prefers merit or experience and wisdom or some unverifiable (hence indisputable) knowledge supposed to come from the gods. An implicit, inexact, and incomplete division is thus made in each culture between values that are regarded as socially efficacious and all others. The latter then spread into secondary domains

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which are abandoned to them, where play occupies an important place.

Here is a more nuanced version of the theory of "compensation."

...

...trying to define a culture by deriving it from games alone would be a rash and probably fallacious undertaking. In fact, every culture has and plays a large number of games of different kinds. ...it is clear that in Ancient Greece, the stadium games illustrate the ideal of the city and contribute to its fulfillment, while in a number of modern states national lotteries or parimutuels go against the professed ideal. Nevertheless they play a significant, perhaps indispensable, role to the precise degree that they offer an aleatory counterpart for the recompense that—in principle—work and merit alone can provide.

In all ways, because play occupies a unique domain the content of which is variable and sometimes even interchangeable with that of modern life, it is important first to determine as precisely as possible the special characteristics of this pursuit, which is regarded as proper for children, but which, when transformed, continues to seduce adults. This has been my first task.

At the same time, I must affirm that this supposed relaxation, at the moment that the adult submits to it, does not absorb him any less than his professional activity . It sometimes makes him exert even greater energy, skill, intelligence, or attention. This freedom and intensity , the fact that the behavior that is so exalting develops in a separate, ideal world, sheltered from any fatal consequence, explains in my view the cultural fertility of games and makes it understandable how the choice to which they attest itself reveals the character, pattern, and values of every society.

Well, sure. But already we're back to reading play for answers to questions which it answers multiply and ambiguously. The lottery example is well-chosen. To read this instance of play "correctly," we need to already know a good chunk of the answer to our question.

It must be said too/again that compensation seems like an overreach: it could be something more like "balance" or "equilibrium," which is concurrent/simultaneous, rather than mere "compensation" after the fact and in isolation. We are driven to the notion of "compensation," I would guess, only because the things we do for work nowadays have become so miserable, or are thought to have become so. Indeed, and especially if culture is defined as: all things beyond the barest necessity.

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Inasmuch as I am also convinced that there exist precise interrelationships of compensation or connivance in games, customs, and institutions, it does not seem to me unreasonable to find out whether the very destiny of cultures, their chance to flourish or stagnate, is not equally determined by their preference for one or another of the basic categories into which I have tried to divide games, categories that are not equally creative. In other words, I have not only undertaken a sociology of games, I have the idea of laying the foundations for a sociology derived from games.

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CHAPTER VI

An Expanded Theory
of Games

The basic attitudes governing play—competition, chance, simulation, and vertigo—are not always encountered in isolation. In many situations it is possible to observe that they are apt to unite their attractions. ...

...

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...a horse race, typical agôn for the jockeys, is at the same time a spectacle which, as such, stimulates mimicry and is also a pretext for betting, through which the competition is a basis of alea. Moreover, the three domains stay relatively autonomous. The principle of the race is not modified, by one's betting on the horses.

This is ideally. And even ideally it is a questionable assertion, since autonomy implies a certain equity which is not usually in evidence.

I assume it can safely be said of some such competitions that they are staged only so that spectators can bet on them, not the other way around. (Or if it is not true yet, it will be soon.) The competition may still be real, but it is hard to imagine total "autonomy" here; or at least it is hard-er if we are biased against the idea that the betting and not the competition is driving the enterprise. But this is a bias and not an analysis; and indeed, betting often has not enjoyed anything like autonomy. The example is in fact quite poorly chosen this time, for at present scale it takes great precautions to prevent "corruption" between these two areas. They could remain autonomous, but this is highly unlikely.

If this objection at the level of mass spectacle does not apply to most street-level activity, then that fact itself suggests that scale mediates autonomy; specifically, that by the time a competitive spectacle qua spectacle truly stimulates mimcry , "autonomy" is endangered. Seeing-and-being-seen is definitionally not autonomous.

...

The principles in question do not blend, even in pairs, with equal facility. ...

...

1. Forbidden Relationships

In the first place, it is clear that vertigo cannot be associated with regulated rivalry, which immediately dilutes it. ...

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...

... Simulation and chance are no more susceptible to mixing. In fact, any ruse makes the turn of the wheel purposeless. It makes no sense to try to deceive chance. The player asks for a decision that assures him the unconditional favor of destiny. ...

2. Contingent Relationships

In contrast, alea may be associated harmlessly with vertigo, and competition with mimicry. In games of chance, it is indeed common knowledge that a special kind of vertigo seizes both lucky and unlucky players. They are no longer aware of fatigue and are scarcely conscious of what is going on around them. ...ilinx, which destroys agôn, does not at all rule out alea. It paralyzes, fascinates, and maddens the player, but does not in any way cause him to violate the rules of the game. ...

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...

There is an analogous relationship between agôn and mimicry. I have already had occasion to stress that every competition is also a spectacle . It unfolds according to identical rules, and with the same anticipation of the outcome. It requires the presence of an audience which crowds about the ticket windows of the stadium or velodrome just as at those of the theater and cinema. The competitors are applauded for each point they score. Their contest has its vicissitudes corresponding to the different acts or scenes in a drama. The point is finally reached where the champion and the star become interchangeable. The two tendencies are also compatible in this respect, for mimicry not only does no harm to agôn but reinforces it, since the competitors must not deceive the audience which acclaims and controls them. In the performance they are expected to do their best, i.e. on the one hand to exhibit perfect discipline and on the other to do their utmost to win.

This actually out-and-out contradicts Lasch. Here, observedness is accountability: the competitors must not deceive the audience which acclaims and controls them .

Again, Caillois is open to the objection that he has assumed an ideal audience which has never existed. It may exist, actually, at the lower levels of organized competition. But it does not exist at the mass level, where too much of the audience have something other than victory and defeat that is driving them to watch. e.g. There is a storm of ludic and spectatorial "corruption" gathering around the growth of women's sports, as a few perceptive and courageous commentators have pointed out.

3. Fundamental Relationships

The cases in which there is a basic compatibility between the principles of play remain to be described. Nothing is more noteworthy in this regard than the exact symmetry between the natures of agôn and alea: parallel and complementary. Both require absolute equity, an equality of mathematical chances of almost absolute precision. Admirably precise rules, meticulous measures, and scientific calculations are evident. However, the two kinds of games have opposite ways of designating the winner. ...

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...

In play and games, agôn and alea are regulated. Without rules, there can be no competitions or games of chance. At the other extreme, mimicry and ilinx equally presume a world without rules in which the player constantly improvises, trusting in a guiding fantasy or a supreme inspiration, neither of which is subject to regulation.

Well, again the "play" of theater would thus seem to have nothing to do with mimicry writ large, even though there is literal "mimicry" involved. Theater "players" are profoundly rulebound. They only appear unbound (it is perhaps the core of their mandate to appear unbound) to the audience. But Caillois does not seem to be describing the audience when he refers to theater as mimicry; and if he is, the possibility (conventionally, the likelihood) that this appearance is not only illusory but also contrary, this possibility would seem to demand its own accounting. (He does seem to be describing the audience when applying mimicry to spectacular competiton, so maybe I'm missing something.)

...

...

The combination of alea and agôn is a free act of will stemming from the satisfaction felt in overcoming an arbitrarily conceived and voluntarily accepted obstacle. The alliance of mimicry and ilinx leads to an inexorable, total frenzy which in its most

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obvious forms appears to be the opposite of play, an indescribable metamorphosis in the conditions of existence. The fit so provoked, being uninhibited, seems to remove the player as far from the authority, values, and influence of the real world,... The association of simulation and vertigo is so powerful and so inseparable that it is naturally part of the sphere of the sacred,...

The quality of such sorcery seems to me to be invincible, to the degree that I am not surprised that it has taken ages to free man from this illusion. This has been achieved by what is commonly called civilization. I believe that the attainment of civilization everywhere is the result of a kind of wager made under different conditions in various places. I will try, in this second part of the book, to speculate about the general lines of this decisive revolution. ...

This is either the skeleton key to understanding right-extremism or a textbook piece of midcentury ethnocentrism, depending on who it is being said about and by whom.

%%

... We have just seen that alea and agôn, like mimicry and ilinx, can be readily combined. However at the same time, within the mixture, it is remarkable that one of the elements in the compound is always active and creative and the other is passive and destructive.

Competition and simulation may and indeed do create cultural forms to which an educational or esthetic value is readily ascrib-

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able. Stable and influential institutions are frequently and almost inevitably derived from them. Regulated competition is in fact, equivalent to sports, and simulation, conceived as play, is nothing other than the theater. The pursuit of chance and vertigo, on the other hand, with rare exceptions leads to nothing and creates nothing that can be developed or established. It frequently happens that they paralyze, interrupt, or destroy.

It does not seem difficult to find the root of such inequality. ... alea and agôn express attitudes diametrically opposed with regard to the will. Agôn, the desire and effort to win a victory, implies that the champion relies upon his own resources. ... Alea, on the contrary, seems to be a foregone acceptance of the verdict of destiny. ...

Both of these are certainly symmetrical ways of assuring perfect equilibrium and absolute equity among the competitors. However, one involves a struggle of the will against external obstacles and the other entails submission of the will to a supposed omen. ...

In the chaotic universe of simulation and vertigo an identical polarity is confirmable. Mimicry consists in deliberate impersonation , which may readily become a work of art, contrivance, or

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cunning. The actor must work out his role and create a dramatic illusion. He is compelled to concentrate and always have his wits about him, just like the athlete in competition. Conversely in ilinx , in this regard comparable to alea, there is submission not only of the will but of the mind . The person lets himself drift and becomes intoxicated through feeling directed, dominated, and possessed by strange powers. To attain them, he need only abandon himself, since the exercise of no special aptitude is required.

Just as the peril in games of chance is to be unable to limit the stakes, in this case the danger lies in not being able to end the disorder that has been accepted. ... Games of simulation lead to the arts of the spectacle , which express and reflect a culture . The individual pursuit of anxiety and panic conquers man's discernment and will. He becomes a prisoner of equivocal and exalting ecstasies in which he believes that he is divine and immortal, ecstasies which in the end destroy him.

Thus, in each of the major combinations only one category of play is truly creative : mimicry in the conjuring of masks and vertigo and agôn in regulated rivalry and chance. The others are immediately destructive . They result in inordinate, inhuman, and irremediable excitations, a kind of frightening and fatal attraction, the import of which is to neutralize creative influence. In societies ruled by simulation and hypnosis, the result occurs at the moment when the spectacle borders on the trance, that is to say, when the sorcerer's mask becomes a theater mask. In societies based upon the combination of merit and chance, there is also an incessant effort, not always successful or rapid, to augment the role of justice to the detriment of that of chance. This effort is called progress.

[79]

...

Caillois—MPG (iii)

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-

[44]

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.

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.

[45]

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.

Typo?!

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,...

[46]

... 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.

...

[47]

...

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,...

...

[48]

...

... 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 identity

as

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.

...

[53]

...

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

[54]

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.