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.