Partida, largada, fugida!
Children playing under the surveillance and philosophical bonhomie of the elders!
Photo taken in Naples museum
Roger Caillois (1913-1978)
"Le jeu n'a pas d'autre sens que lui-même."
Roger Caillois
Caillois' key ideas on play
Caillois begins Man, Play and Games (2001), with Johan Huizinga's definition of the play: "Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means."
He provides strict and distinct categories of games which he describes 4 distinct game categories.
Agon, or competition. E.g. Chess
Alea, or chance. E.g. Playing a slot machine
Mimicry, or mimesis, or role playing. E.g. Playing a MMORPG
Ilinx (Greek for "whirlpool"), or vertigo, in the sense of altering perception. E.g. taking hallucinogens, riding roller coasters, children spinning until they fall down.
Caillois also provides a continuum between two opposite poles which the four categories can be divided into:
Paidia or uncontrolled fantasy. E.g. Concert, festivals
Ludus which requires an ever greater amount of effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity. E.g. GO
Caillois builds critically on the precedent theories on play Homo Ludens, the book which has been published in 1938 by Dutch historian, cultural theorist and professor Johan Huizinga. Huizinga discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Caillois disputes Huizinga's emphasis on competition in play. He also notes the considerable difficulty in defining play, concluding that play is best described by six core characteristics:
it is free, or not obligatory; it is separate (from the routine of life) occupying its own time and space; it is uncertain, so that the results of play cannot be pre-determined and so that the player's initiative is involved; it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth and ends as it begins; it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players; and it involves make-believe that confirms for players the existence of imagined realities that may be set against 'real life'.
Huizinga uses the term "Play Theory" within the book to define the conceptual space in which play occurs. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture.
Caillois critiqued Johan Huizinga in his book 'Man, Play and Games to argue that gambling is a game when Huizinga outlined the corruption of play due to gambling. Caillois theorises gambling into his category of Agon as, ‘…like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph’. As long as a play provides social activity and winner’s triumph, whether it involves money or fatal thrill is not a problem in Caillois’ Agon (competition) and Alea (games of chance). Huizinga initially outlined the danger of corruption in “play,” fatality should not be involved, such as the risk of losing money. Huizinga defines ‘card-games’ as ‘deadly earnest business,’ Huizinga’s interpretation on the damage that the ‘futile activity of gambling makes on society’ can be seen in his book Homo Ludens where he tries to analyse the meaning of 'pure' play. Caillois opposes this argument as the distinction between games of skill or competition (Agôn) and games of chance (Alea) categorises gambling as a mode of play.
Caillois' interest in mimicry
When Caillois worked with Bataille at the College of Sociology, they worked on two essays on insects in the 1930s: ‘La mante religieuse. De la biologie à la psychanalyse’(1934) and ‘Mimétisme et la psychasthénie légendaire’ (1935) Caillois identifies the praying mantis and mimicking animals as nature’s automatons and masquerades. He formulates in his peculiarly naturalist fashion what it would mean to act and create without the intervention of the sovereign ego, that magnificent artifact of the modern West that surrealism and the avant-garde have taken such drastic measures to counteract. These articles might read like two obscurantist entomological studies that, in a way some would describe as bizarre, try to contradict all evolutionary explications for animal cannibalism and mimicry. Their interest lay in the publication in the context of Minotaure. Such interest makes it possible to see them as the search for figures that evidence the possibility of intelligence without thought, creativity without art, and agency in the absence of the (human) agent.
Wikipedia
music
Music Of Changes -- John Cage
This is Book I of John Cage's MUSIC OF CHANGES for piano, recorded live at a Collide-O-Scope Music Concert (April 2010) - Augustus Arnone, piano. The video is assembled using iconography and text from the I Ching, as well as utilizing a series of paintings by Michelle Chen. The montage was assembled.
https://youtu.be/Yn3QZzw0vlY
Rimsky-Korsakov, Flight of the Bumblebee
Conductor Zubin Mehta
Berliner Philharmoniker in der Waldbühne Berlin
https://youtu.be/6QV1RGMLUKE
Children playing under the surveillance and philosophical bonhomie of the elders!
Photo taken in Naples museum
Roger Caillois (1913-1978)
"Le jeu n'a pas d'autre sens que lui-même."
Roger Caillois
Caillois' key ideas on play
Caillois begins Man, Play and Games (2001), with Johan Huizinga's definition of the play: "Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means."
He provides strict and distinct categories of games which he describes 4 distinct game categories.
Agon, or competition. E.g. Chess
Alea, or chance. E.g. Playing a slot machine
Mimicry, or mimesis, or role playing. E.g. Playing a MMORPG
Ilinx (Greek for "whirlpool"), or vertigo, in the sense of altering perception. E.g. taking hallucinogens, riding roller coasters, children spinning until they fall down.
Caillois also provides a continuum between two opposite poles which the four categories can be divided into:
Paidia or uncontrolled fantasy. E.g. Concert, festivals
Ludus which requires an ever greater amount of effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity. E.g. GO
Caillois builds critically on the precedent theories on play Homo Ludens, the book which has been published in 1938 by Dutch historian, cultural theorist and professor Johan Huizinga. Huizinga discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Caillois disputes Huizinga's emphasis on competition in play. He also notes the considerable difficulty in defining play, concluding that play is best described by six core characteristics:
it is free, or not obligatory; it is separate (from the routine of life) occupying its own time and space; it is uncertain, so that the results of play cannot be pre-determined and so that the player's initiative is involved; it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth and ends as it begins; it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players; and it involves make-believe that confirms for players the existence of imagined realities that may be set against 'real life'.
Huizinga uses the term "Play Theory" within the book to define the conceptual space in which play occurs. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture.
Caillois critiqued Johan Huizinga in his book 'Man, Play and Games to argue that gambling is a game when Huizinga outlined the corruption of play due to gambling. Caillois theorises gambling into his category of Agon as, ‘…like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph’. As long as a play provides social activity and winner’s triumph, whether it involves money or fatal thrill is not a problem in Caillois’ Agon (competition) and Alea (games of chance). Huizinga initially outlined the danger of corruption in “play,” fatality should not be involved, such as the risk of losing money. Huizinga defines ‘card-games’ as ‘deadly earnest business,’ Huizinga’s interpretation on the damage that the ‘futile activity of gambling makes on society’ can be seen in his book Homo Ludens where he tries to analyse the meaning of 'pure' play. Caillois opposes this argument as the distinction between games of skill or competition (Agôn) and games of chance (Alea) categorises gambling as a mode of play.
Caillois' interest in mimicry
When Caillois worked with Bataille at the College of Sociology, they worked on two essays on insects in the 1930s: ‘La mante religieuse. De la biologie à la psychanalyse’(1934) and ‘Mimétisme et la psychasthénie légendaire’ (1935) Caillois identifies the praying mantis and mimicking animals as nature’s automatons and masquerades. He formulates in his peculiarly naturalist fashion what it would mean to act and create without the intervention of the sovereign ego, that magnificent artifact of the modern West that surrealism and the avant-garde have taken such drastic measures to counteract. These articles might read like two obscurantist entomological studies that, in a way some would describe as bizarre, try to contradict all evolutionary explications for animal cannibalism and mimicry. Their interest lay in the publication in the context of Minotaure. Such interest makes it possible to see them as the search for figures that evidence the possibility of intelligence without thought, creativity without art, and agency in the absence of the (human) agent.
Wikipedia
music
Music Of Changes -- John Cage
This is Book I of John Cage's MUSIC OF CHANGES for piano, recorded live at a Collide-O-Scope Music Concert (April 2010) - Augustus Arnone, piano. The video is assembled using iconography and text from the I Ching, as well as utilizing a series of paintings by Michelle Chen. The montage was assembled.
https://youtu.be/Yn3QZzw0vlY
Rimsky-Korsakov, Flight of the Bumblebee
Conductor Zubin Mehta
Berliner Philharmoniker in der Waldbühne Berlin
https://youtu.be/6QV1RGMLUKE
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