"It is meritorious and fruitful to have grasped the affinity which exists between play and the secret or mysterious, but this relationship cannot be part of the definition of play, which is nearly always spectacular or ostentatious. Without doubt, secrecy, mystery, and even travesty can be transformed into play activity, but it must be immediately pointed out that this transformation is necessarily to the detriment of the secret and mysterious, which play exposes, publishes, and somehow expends. In a word, play tends to remove the very nature of the mysterious. On the other hand, when the secret, the mask, or the costume fulfills a sacramental function one can be sure that not play, but an institution is involved. All that is mysterious or make-believe by nature approaches play: moreover, it must be that the function of fiction or diversion is to remove the mystery" (4)
Caillois insists that the simulation/vertigo pairing doesn't encourage play but expresses an institutional function. It is the institution in oral societies, the founding and unifying ceremony that the culture works toward, unified in its move toward symbolic exchange.
But we're playing to reinstate the mystery, to reinscribe the sacred by way of the accident.
The difference is that we're attempting to pose alternative modes of thinking to a failing system based on utility.
The secret's indeed at play, and we're indeed expressing something of an institution.
But the institution's changed. Through our tools, we can play at reinstating mystery, not at dissipating it.
We'll pick up what play expends and refashion play through its own waste.
I agree that the quoted passage is puzzling. To link Play with the "secretive and mysterious" is a broad statement because as we're considering it from the point of view of a definition of play, we immediately have a genuine mystery! I think your point about making the contrast with utility is obviously correct, because utility is practical and productive, which seems to leave the mysterious and the secretive out (but why are these two linked). We have to remember that utility until recently was not secular or separated necessarily from either the mysterious or the secretive, because spiritual affairs intruded into the material life. To what extent that last statement is true opens up the whole debate to even broader grounds than the discussion about play vs non-play, narrowly defined. But isn't this a typical outcome?
ReplyDeleteFurther to the above, I thought I'd quote the below, from http://goo.gl/2sRP0, a reference I found by googling the Callois quote above (...such is play):
ReplyDeleteThe author contends Callois got it precisely backwards, because of his Enlightenment prejudices. ( I can't help thinking there's more in this than blandly accepting what "mystery" might mean in the ocntext of "play"...
"Another major author on play, Roger Caillois, writes: “secrecy, mystery, and even
travesty are what play exposes, publishes, and somehow expends. In a word, play
tends to remove the very nature of the mysterious.”4
The cliché of the bleary-eyed
gamer clicking all night captures this cynicism perfectly: play is drug-like escape,
stealing our productivity. The exhaustion of the mysterious is not the result of play.
It is the reverse. It is the result of constraining the concept of reality to the scientific
paradigm. For us “moderns” living on this side modernity, the world is cast as a
colossal system to measure and master. Caillois has it backwards: the mysterious is
vanquished because we wish to control irruptions of danger and disruption. The
concept of play has atrophied because of our modern desire to manage risk. This is
evident in games to the degree that they are reduced to a series of rational
procedures to complete: get from A to B; eliminate C; minimize risks D and E; collect
X, Y, Z; and so on. We think this is play."
from Lawrence lawrence.mcdonell@gmail.com