Caillois: Target Instruction

Roger Caillois book Man, Play, and Games gives us a different angle for understanding Virilio’s Target instruction—which is to think of our disaster as a sign—because we are also reading Caillois in our Target slot. His book explains how play (in the sense of a game experience) is the foundation of our experience of society and how it functions. Drawing from Johan Huizinga’s theory of play in his 1933 lecture “The Cultural Limits of Play and the Serious” and the subsequent book Homo Ludens (1938), Caillois defines four categories of play: agon, alea, mimicry, ilinx.

TARGET/CLASS GOAL

We already have the instruction of seeing the accident as a sign; we need to find a way to visualize or experience the target as an omen. Caillois will help us understand how we give the accident space form in the object/event domain. We therefore need to know how to read its patterns (derived from class notes):

• Looking for sprawl functionality in accident space.
• Trying to identify the fatality of the event; its domain of irreducibility (event at limit).
• Looking for a singular detail – modernist poetry – how does the external world show spiritual reality.

CAILLOIS' MAIN POINT

Games follow a mimicry/ilinx frame not an agon/alea framework. More primitive games are still an aspect of thinking in society, but they have been suppressed and pushed into private domains. Caillois identifies the festival site as the location of the mimicry/ilinx drive; he shows us what happens when pataphysics enters society.) (Class notes).

PLAY TYPE	MEANING
Agon	Competitive games. “[C]ombat in which equality of chances is artificially created” for confrontation under ideal conditions. Agon is “always a question of rivalry which hinges on a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, etc.), exercised, within defined limits and without outside resistance, in such a way that the winner appears to better than the loser in a certain category of exploits” (14).
Alea	“This is the Latin name for the game of dice” (17). "[D]estiny is the sole artisan of victory, and where there is rivalry, what is meant is that the winner has been more favored by fortune than the loser” (17).
Mimicry	“All play presupposes the temp acceptance . . . [of] an imaginary universe. . . . [The player] forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another” (19).
Ilinx	Games “which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind” (23).

Definition of play: Play is spectacular or ostentatious. Play exposes the secret and mysterious. It “publishes, and somehow expends” the secret/mystery. “In a word, play tends to remove the very nature of the mysterious” (4). “[I]t creates no wealth or goods, thus differing from a work or art. . . . Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and of often of money for the purchase of gambling equipment or eventually to pay for the establishment” (6).

The agon/alea mindset represents modern society. The current competitive mindset, Caillois argues, rewards the skill and ingenuity of people who use knowledge, strategy, or strength to move ahead in society. Competitors have an edge over ‘players’ who, for economic reasons, are not adequately educated or are not well equipped in other ways to compete in a capitalist market economy. Caillois states that lower class citizens or citizens that for any reason cannot compete successfully in an agonistic market, resort to alea, chance. He explains that the lottery, gambling, or other get-rich quick schemes, serve to equalize the class disparities in contemporary society formed by the agon mindset. For example, a person who believes in chance and routinely buys lottery tickets not only contributes significantly to the economy, he or she is also giving him or herself the chance to bypass the competitive marketplace route to success and go directly to the top with a big win. In this manner, alea balances out the social distinctions in agon-type societies by using beliefs, superstition, and hope as a means of compensation—chance, as Caillois describes it, seems to be the compensation for not being able to compete effectively in an agon-based society.

MASK

Callois explains the importance of the mask in Dionysian (primitive) societies as “a sacred object universally present, whose transformation into a plaything perhaps marks a prime mutation in the history of civilization” (59). Dionysian societies “are ruled equally by masks and possession, i.e. by mimicry and ilinx” (87). Later agon/alea societies, by contrast, are called “rational” societies (87). Masks “reinvigorate, renew, and recharge both nature and society” (88). Caillois explains that the dance and festival rituals of primitive societies extend mimicry to its limit in order to become an experience of vertigo. The rituals themselves and their increasing excitement literally transform and control not only the dancers but the crowds that watch. Caillois states that these rituals are the precursors of the power systems at work in contemporary society. He states that masks “are the true social bond” (89) of primitive societies—they maintain the social order.

The shaman ritual, he explains, “involves a violent crisis and temporary loss of consciousness in which the shaman becomes possessed by one or more spirits. He then embarks upon a magic journey through the world, which he narrates and re-enacts” (90). No matter how violent the attack, it all “takes place according to a precise liturgy and in conformity with a traditional mythology. The séance is like a play, with the possessed in costume” (93).

Alfred Metraux, analyzing the course and nature of the voodooistic fit has demonstrated how the subject’s conscious desire to undergo it, an appropriate technique for stimulating it, and a liturgical pattern in its unfolding are necessary. The role of suggestion and even simulation is certain. However, most of the time they themselves seem to be the results of the impatience of the one desiring to be possessed and therefore a means of hastening the onset of the seizure. Suggestion and simulation increase one’s susceptibility and stimulate the trance. (94)

Caillois repeatedly refers to the notion of contagion in his book as a collective social phenomena initiated by the parameters of play. In the above passage, he implies that the shaman’s use of suggestion (the shaman’s dance, acts, gestures, the accompanying drum beats and the story he is retelling in his dance) creates a momentum that escalates to vertigo. The shaman is using and giving passage to ideas through his body and the figures he acts out in his story. I suppose that we can view this in the context of our project as the mask/shaman/ritual pushing ideas through the body or a figure to its limit. Caillois states that the mimicry ritual “is not a game. It ends in vertigo, becomes part of the religious order, and fulfills a social function” (94). The wearer of the mask may not be deceived at the beginning, but he “yields to the intoxication that seizes him. His mind is enthralled, he becomes completely abandoned to the disorder excited in him by his own mimicry” (95). Interestingly, he states that “these apparitions from the beyond [in Dionysian societies] 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 the public life of the group is impregnated with them” (95).

When a more advanced (agon/alea cultural mindset) succeeds a less advanced one, “a palpable repression of the power of vertigo and simulation is verified. [The older culture] lose[s] their traditional dominance, are pushed to the periphery of public life, [and] reduced to roles that become more and more modern and intermittent . . . or are regulated to the limited and regulated domain of games and fiction where they afford men the same eternal satisfactions, but in sublimated form, serving merely as an escape from boredom or work and entailing neither madness or delirium” (97).

Our previous instructions, especially our Theory CATTt slot (Baudrillard), has pointed us toward the notion of ilinx as the space of sensation that we need to focus on in the second part of the course. The full sensation of ilinx/vertigo is the logical disaster space of our accidents—it is our disaster at its limit before it destructs (Baudrillard’s instruction). Ilinx, Caillois explains, in Dionysian societies and in the suppressed mimicry/ilinx mindset that contemporary societies satisfy through games, uses the power of mystery to regulate meaning. All of its meanings emanate from within the realm of mystery, the realm of trope—there is nothing outside of ilinx other than the full experience of undefined potentialities. I suppose that we could interpret a boundary around meaning in the experience of ilinx as the bound created by the mask (a visual bound). The inability to experience a definitive bound in the experience of ilinx, perhaps caused by the not knowing and the environmental influences that contribute to the passage from mimicry to possession, could itself be the logic for bounding the experience in knowledge—as if not knowing is the logic of knowing.

The mask, in contemporary society, Caillois explain, is now a protective tool. It now plays a utilitarian role: as “a means of disguise for the malefactor seeking to hide his identity, it does not intrude a new presence but protect him from being recognized. . . . A mask is rather a mechanism for protecting the respiratory organs in a contaminated environment or assuring a supply of needed oxygen to the lungs” (130). The uniform, too, “replaces the mask of a vertiginous society” (132). The uniform is the exact opposite of the mask. A mask “aimed to dissimulate and terrify” and erupt a “fearful power.” The “uniform is also a disguise, but it is official, permanent, regulated, and, above all, leaves the face exposed” (132). Caillois states that the shaman or other primitive authority figure could contort his face in any manner necessary to express the stories he tries to tell through his body, but the contemporary “uniformed representative must be careful that his bare face reveal nothing but calm and rationality, the face of a person specially charged with administering the law” (132).

Caillois ends his fascinating book with the different atmospheres of the travelling fair, carnival, and the circus. The circus, he states, is the “austere side of the fair” (137). Ilinx and mimicry are still very much alive in the atmosphere of festivals and travelling fairs, but the circus brings a seriousness to the various aspects of the characters and acts that comprise which is important to our project in this course. The tightrope walker, for example, has to master vertigo. Caillois writes that the high wire is “the very heart of prowess and [where the] only aim is to master vertigo. The game consists expressly in moving through space as if the void were not fascinating, and as if no danger were involved ” (137). The tightrope walker has to be unconscious of the fear of falling and injuring him or herself in order to master vertigo. He or she defers the suspense of this conscious unconsciousness into the audience, who, like the crowds in Dionysian rituals, succumb to the contagion of the danger and experience ilinx through the acrobat--they, in the act of the experience, become the acrobat walker, conscious of the danger, and fearing for their lives through him without any real danger of being hurt (another deferred--and thereby--controlled) experience of ilinx.

While the acrobat gives us an example of how to control vertigo we, obviously, cannot reenact the tightrope walker’s experience that Caillois describes in our projects--even with the use of the four tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). Our Target instruction from Caillois, therefore comes from the clown.

In our projects we “want to introduce well-being into the equation” (class notes). In last year’s class, we learned that the commodity form (advertising) has taken over philosophy’s role of establishing well-being. Our project therefore deals with the question of life (contemporary life, if I am interpreting my notes correctly, is an open slot in electracy--an area that needs to be defined). Our instructions from Caillois are to “look again at the secret in Baudrillard--the secret (enigma) is going to be more important in our project because it has an attractive effect” (class notes). The secret is related to the space of ilinx. In our project we “have to assert that the situations we are addressing [our disasters] are driven by ilinx” (class notes). Our accidents actually reflect the ilinx experience in the object space felt in the subject space--it combines both and pushes the accident space to its limit (to an excess limit), as Baudrillard explains. The accident space describes a giddiness and spinning--a drive that people need to satisfy through experience. Our instruction involves how to interpret that drive (class notes). The answer involves looking at the clown’s role in the circus atmosphere. The clown is a parodic clown; he or she breaks ilinx with laughter and disruption. He/She interrupts the experience of chaos by breaking the trance like state of ilinx. Laughter or disrupting the normal experience of a situation with something abnormal is the way we control ilinx in the figure of the disaster we will create at the end of this course.

The notion of attitude is crucial. Attitude describes a certain direction and a movement that is following a pattern in a certain direction and way. “The attitude of electracy is fumisme (parodic). The Western tradition laughs at parody; mocks it. Dadaism, for example, is a deliberate mockery of the whole Western tradition” (class notes). Pataphysics is a parody of metaphysics: it does what it says; it is more metaphysics than metaphysics (class notes). It meets the reality of a thing and pushes it to its extreme--like science fiction.

We have to take a loose attitudes when we create the figure of our accident visually in Prezi. We need to take the accident space and turn it, in the manner of the spinning feeling of ilinx, using trope. If we control the space of the accident in this manner, the thing that seemed complete before our intervention will surprise us by producing more meaning. This additional meaning will emerge in trope, the turning space; it will create the meaning beyond meaning that is the event space in electracy.

Human Embodiment of Accident / Event

In our projects, we are trying to develop a metaphysics of human decision-making; an act that is situated and defined by the parameters of a world or reality that is always already underway. Our goal is to enact the shift from dasein--being, the presence of the human in the world, in an ontological sense--to ereignis--something coming into itself through itself--which can be understood as an historical event. When we make a decision, it is an enacting of ereignis. The elements of the choice, including the choice itself, have already been made. The individual him or herself only comprises approximately two percent of the drive that constitutes a decision (class notes). Tradition has already made a whole series of choices and we exist inescapably among them. When we make a decision, all the factors that lead to the moment of choice are already existent, so, in essence, we are only gathering together and reformulating in our own contexts what already exists--and perpetuating these ideas and practices, which, with repetition, constitute what becomes tradition.

The question electracy asks is which parts of what constitutes a decision-making act do we have control of and which parts part do we not have control of. We put ourselves in the position of answering this question when we think of the event from a first person perspective. The electrate subject experiences the event as something that is happening in real time; he or she experiences the world through the apparatus--he or she undergoes the electrate apparatus (class notes). In electracy, the thought about the accident happens through the apparatus. The apparatus is a relay, but the thought itself, through the mechanism of the apparatus, always comes back to us, to the human embodiment of the thing itself, which, when identified, carries a whole history of meaning though time--it gives a sort of foundation to a new logic of understanding while also enabling a whole series of influences that exist as equally valid despite the fact that it may seem that only chance bought a current fact or dilemma into being over time. For example, professor Ulmer traced back the tar pitch that protects wood from eroding in utility poles in Gainesville, FL, to the origins of the spice trade and trade shipping routes. Early ships made of wood had to be protected from the water erosion and molluscs known as teredo navalis that bore into the wood and weakened its efficacy, so they were coated in tar pitch to repel molluscs. The practice of treating wood, therefore, was brought to America because of the spice trade, particularly, pepper. Pepper--in other words, the human need to enjoy the taste of food--constitutes the human embodiment of the event of the accident that is the soil contamination around the Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville. The problem of contamination is an unforeseen, unplanned, consequence of a particular human need. The current soil contamination problem, viewed/thought from the first person position of the event (ereignis), through the electrate thinking apparatus, can be traced back to a past event that constitutes a human embodiment of the current problem (pepper and the human need for better tasting food), which carries a whole history of associations from the past to create the current situation. All of these influences might be thought of as random, chance occurrences, but electracy argues that the social influences that bring something into the present (the whole history of decisions that created the soil contamination problem in Gainesville) have a uniquely human logic.

Professor Ulmer asked individuals in the class to identify the human embodiment of their accidents. We had to identify or think “the sprawl functionality in our accidents” (class notes). First, we had to identify the human aspect of our accidents; then we had to determine the intersection between the fundamental organic life aspect of our accident and the technical aspects of it, or its technics. Professor Ulmer stated that “for there to be accident, there has to be a human vitality and a tool that intersects” (class notes)--“humanity is subsequent to technics” (class notes).

We are dealing with two forces (class notes):

1. TECHNICS (tool prior to humanity)
2. PLAY

To think of the cancer cells with this logic, I’d have to identify that an untreated cancer cell’s proliferation will eventually (and ironically) cause death. The logic of a cancer cell’s compromised suicide program (apoptosis) can be compared to the manifest sprawl and the social effects of a capitalist economy. In this context, professor Ulmer suggested that in the current social and political economy, nobody wants to admit that death is necessary. Cancer is aberrant to the social norm of life, prosperity, healthy growth. The rap against capitalism is that it compromises everything to grow. The capitalist machine can be allied to the growth and spread of cancer (class notes) but without a physical, breathing body to establish a cap or limit. The human embodiment of the accident space of a cell gone awry in the human body is either 1) the human body itself (the human being, human flesh) as an accident, as the fatality of the event or 2) the meaning and history of the term apoptosis as analyzed through a specific type of cancer (with its own series of environmental and biological factors that can be traced back though time to an initiating factor), as an accident and fatality of the body. The term apoptosis is the term the Greeks used “to describe the ‘dropping off’ or ‘falling off’ of petals from flowers, or leaves from trees” (OED). In modern usage, it is a medical term for “resolution, relaxation, or loosening of something.” In biology, it refers to the “death of individual cells” (OED). It is the manner in which a normal cell acts after it has served its purpose or in order to preserve the cellular order needed for healthy human life. Natalie Angier, in Natural Obsessions, describes it as the process that occurs “when a cell essentially ‘decides’ to die for the good of the body around it, and initiates a sequence of molecular events to literally blow itself apart.” Angier calls it a cell’s “suicide program” (xvi).

(Genetics Home Reference, NIH, 2011)

As I stated in last year's spring course, the various historical meanings of the term apoptosis have interesting literary associations dealing with the changing seasons, longing, and death through the work of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shelley, and no doubt many other poets and artists. I think that I will still have to chose a specific cancer before working in Prezi, but the human embodiment of the accident space of a cell with a damaged suicide program is the science (technics) that brought (and continues to bring) knowledge of how the disease is caused, and how it can be prevented, across the centuries to the present day, along with how cancer "plays" in the logic of its reality in the terms associated with it through history and the literature which addresses the related questions of loss and death. Additionally, when (or if) I choose a particular cancer to focus the accident space later in the course, the series of meanings than can be drawn from the term apoptosis can be analyzed in terms of the history of the specific cancer, how it acts in the body, how it is treated, how it is caused, etc.

Part Two Overview

Part two of this course will move our thinking into the dimension of the figure. Literal meaning is the outcome of the use of figurative language—the figuration of language is inescapable. While computers can process factual information—literal meaning—at incredible speeds, it cannot be programmed to process and make literal meaning from figurative language unless by accident and only as an accident recognizable through the relational modalities of human cognition. Part two of this course, therefore, involves our approach to the question: can we formulate a figure that supports thinking that could lead to deliberate action.

We are still thinking of our accident as sign (Virilio), but we need to ask ourselves what properties our accident as sign has that give it its own nature—makes it predictable. Baudrillard does not look for a rational option; he looks for an unavoidable option (something destined, predestined and returning) (class notes).

Our task is to engage in a different dimension of thinking and logic. The new dimension in electracy is the dimension of augury (dream work). We need to treat our chosen accidents as omens, and work in the realm of dream logic to think and visualize these omens. The process of doing this and the end result will resemble or be the metaphysics of the omen. Baudrillard, in our Theory slot, is key to our ability to think of our accident as an omen. Our accidents are the spaces of fatality. They are the logic of human fatality. The Fates, as mentioned in an earlier blog entry, create the predestined tensions that orient our lives. We can think of them as the hidden products of society that orient our inner lives. Like the narrative logic (mythologies) that orient our understanding of ourselves in the world and in society, they deliver human life and its many influences to us in the form of the figurative tensions between the axis of conflict (the Helper, Subject, and Opponents) and the axis of communication that is the product (and perhaps the mask) of the hidden desires and aims that give energy and form to the Sender, Object, and Receiver roles.

Our thinking dimension—the dimension of augury and the realm of the Fates—tells us that there are deep, underlying patterns in the world of human experience. In part two, we will try to read these patterns and use their logic to understand the accident space, which acts at the fatal limit of logic and, in turn, refreshes the routine of everyday life by injecting it with the escape it both fears and yearns for. These patterns in the accident logic will create the polar space/logic between pleasure and pain and map them on and within each other. Our final figure of this logic will be an expression of thinking of our accident from the first person event position. It will put in real-time the happening of my experience of reality today undergoing the logic of the electrate apparatus. (In electracy, the thought about the accident happens through the apparatus—it’s a relay be means of the apparatus—but it always comes back to us (class notes).)

We are “trying to develop a metaphysics of human decision” in process. We are trying “to think about the ontology of pure reason” (class notes). This process can be explained as a shift from Heidegger’s dasein to ereignis, to the historical event. “When you make a decision, it is as an ereignis.” The decision has already been made; it has already happened. All of the decisions we make can be imagined as a massive palimpsest of ideas whose paths and connections have always already been experienced or thought (either actually or in the possibilities that their simultaneous existence enables). These decisions are the secrets that the patterns of the Fates and destiny hold and endlessly weave together and which people experience uniquely and individually despite the fact that the innovation we bring to a decision making process is only approximately “two percent” (class notes) of its action. Tradition “has already made a whole series of choices. In decision-making, we need to think about which parts we have control over and which parts belong to tradition" (class notes).

PART TWO