Like all of you, I've spent the past week attempting to mine some ideas out of the Caillois. One of the challenges I have with the text is that I'm constantly questioning how many of these elements remain relevant in accordance with the move from literacy to electracy. That is to say, we see a move in Caillois where society moves from vertigo and simulation as the guiding focus of culture to that of agon and alea (often with alea serving as a recompense to agon's denials). So, while I think I'm on the same page as all of you with the need to reintroduce ilynx to escape the limits to utilitarian thinking, I'm almost wondering if another category should be introduced? That is to say, while ilynx focuses on the pleasure/pain axis we're concerned with, is it possible to invent another category that's perhaps more commensurate with what we know about modernity?
Also, Caillois mentions that in "primitive" or oral cultures, vertigo comes by way of simulation. Vertigo is the goal, but simulation is the means. What can we say about the interplay of these categories in our concepts? It seems like the context of the catastrophe, with things left hanging constantly in suspense, that chance might be what we're looking at. Just as the flaneur of the arcades surfed the crowd, taking in sights, we now act as a flaneur to the world, moving quickly through information as major news networks wonder which geopolitical catastrophe will kill us firth (which sets it off? Military intervention in Libya? Rick Scott's assistant suicide of the educational and labor systems? An exploding oil rig?). So, could we say that the conditions of pleasure/pain in the dromosphere build to vertigo by way of chance...and accumulation?
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