Of The Endings of Games

Trying to decipher a thought process from 2001 or 2002. The entries are not dated but occur between entries that are. More mishaps. Misspelt author. Missing publication information. The notebook has "Callois" and page numbers. And no title. No translator's credit. It plunges into questions and quotations. I'm sure the notebook records excerpts from Roger Caillois Les jeux et les hommes read in its English translation Man, Play and Games.

p. 17-18
It is possible to map agon & alea onto hermeneutic stances. I quote:

In the latter [agon] his only reliance is upon himself; in the former [alea], he counts on everything, even the vaguest sign, the slightest outside occurrence, which he immediately takes to be an omen or token — in short, he depends on everything except himself.

p. 19

Perhaps it is in the degree to which a child approximates an animal that games of chance are not as important to children as to adults. For the child, play is active.

This in the notebook provokes the remark "something to be said about the order of presentation agôn-alea-mimicry-ilinx". What that something is is left unsaid. I can only hazard a guess at this late remove. And only by folding upon this the quotation about the interpretative stances (see above pp. 17-18) and bending it towards what follows (see below p. 23).

p.23

Mimicry is incessant invention. The rule of the game is unique: it consists in the actor's fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead to the spectator to break the spell. The spectator must lend himself to the illusion without first challenging the décor, mask or artifice which for a given time he is asked to believe in as more real than reality itself."

And the comments from the notebook: "when the bubble bursts, players can get involved in the vertigo of yes-no, begin again or not. call and response and its termination become 'digitalized' that is alea can cancel ilinx"

Now reading these three excerpts, I am coming to a reading that posits the following: children have less of an interest in terminating any specific instance of a game than say adults might have; because they are not inclined to end the ongoing play, children have little need of the stroke of chance to mark endings — they have less need of omens and tokens — children are their own random event generators.

And so for day 960
30.07.2009