The play of the world

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Play

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Notes

Introduction

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the fundamental activity of man, the back-and-forth movement of encounter and exchange with the world in which man is continually engaged.

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It is a structuring activity, the activity out of which understanding comes.

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Play, production, and desire come together insofar as play always involves and is always a part of production and desire.

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1: Play

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The connection between games and play ends up restricting play to a side activity, one that is discontinuous with certain activities in our daily lives.

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Indeed, the essence of play is its capacity to saturate virtually every aspect of our lives,

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the scientific method itself does not really eliminate verification by common sense, authority, and prejudgment, but it does force those factors underground.

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it is only through play that the structures we live by grow and change. The role of play is not to work comfortably within its own structures but rather constantly to develop its structures through play.

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Heidegger’s description of the hermeneutic circle. For Heidegger, the pro- cess of interpretation involves the paradoxical relationship between the part and the whole of that which is to be inter- preted: one can only understand the whole through the parts, but one cannot begin to understand the parts without some understanding of the whole.

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The activity of play does not concern itself with an instrumental attitude toward the world;

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One who plays always has a direction, an orientation, but it is a direction or orientation loosely held, and subject to revision, that is being played with precisely because it is subject to revision. The direction is in question, and only a willingness to put the perspective into question can generate play.

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Play begins with the putting-in-question, and proceeds, ideally, until some further understanding of that which has been put into question has been achieved.

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those, like Gadamer, who see presence or Being behind freeplay are trying to stop the freeplay by founding it in a presence or origin. For Derrida, one really only understands freeplay if one recognizes that its very essence is its lack of foundation—that there is no Being behind freeplay, that there is nothing behind freeplay, that there is only freeplay.

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Still, whereas play is free in the sense that there is no Being in which to ground it, it is also bound in two crucial senses: first, the beginning of play is always necessarily connected to a foreproject, to a series of prejudgments that are at issue in the activity of play itself, that give an orientation to the play; and second, the result of play is a structure, a framework or order that has been confirmed by the play itself.

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The why of play is quite obvious: one seeks to play because one believes that the understanding achieved through play is more valuable than the kinds of understanding achieved in other ways.

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There is no doubt that openness implies risk, that whether the play be conversational, sexual, or of some other kind, one’s own status is at stake. But the willingness to forego one’'s own territory, to be willing to pass beyond what one knows one is capable of, is the fundamental feature of play.

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Without play these experiences are only possible in a violent way:

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our society still determines a job's status not solely in terms of the money to be made at it but also in terms of its potential for play. The more a job’s potential for play, the higher its status usually is.

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to imagine the end of play is to imagine the end of the world, and here pure entropy makes as much sense as does pure understanding. The world plays, and it is possible to imagine a world of play without man, but it is not possible to imagine man in a world that has played itself out.

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undeniable that language is an important aspect of natural play. But the play of the natural world preceded the play of language, and indeed, generated it, so we must assume that there is more to human play than language.

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we should not maintain that the sign “man” is nothing more than a sign, for it pointed to a particu- lar location within the linguistic and natural systems that was worthy of being played with and defined as something more than a mere sign. What we need to maintain is that the ex- ploration of the effects of that sign has—at least for the mo- ment, and at least in the context in which it was used—played itself out.

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as Gadamer argues, ‘“To stand within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible” (p. 324). Our structures for understanding the world, the tradition out of which and in which our interpretations of the world are developed, make understanding possible precisely because our entry into the natural play has a particular orientation; without such an ori- entation, no understanding at all would be possible

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The scientific perspective is hardly dis- interested, is indeed an instrumental perspective, one which seeks to understand (and ultimately dominate)

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scientific method and the kinds of experimentation that result from it are in their own right derived from a precedent kind of activity, from play with the world rather than separa- tion from it.

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if we limit ourselves to the understood, the ontological and the epistemological always correspond, but we need to recognize that the understood is always framed in terms of cruxes—of that which is not under- stood, of that which does not fit

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changes in the epistemological framework of the sort we have outlined are possible only through play,

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2: Production

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people still play on the job no mat- ter how alienated they are from their labor; that even though the work itself may not be essentially playful, people work at making it playful and find ways of doing so.

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ultimately it is the opportunity to confront new situations and to play with them that defines desirable jobs,

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It is the repetition involved in any playful context that makes the difference possible at all;

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the sense of repetition provides the structure which allows the difference to be introduced.

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Anti-Oedipus¹

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all of what we call “nature,” including man, is nothing more (or less) than the play of production, consumption, and enregisterment. Further, we can see how each of these pro- cesses involves the same constituent elements we began with: novelty and repetition.

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Play in the sense in which I am using it has no utilitarian purpose, just as one cannot conceive of the ‘‘pur- pose’ of the rock’s play with the wind or the rain, and it is in this sense that play is the same for both rock and man.

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In a sense the quality of the play improves as one moves up the scale, because the greater degree of freedom and risk also involves an increase in the importance of the play

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the concept of play is applicable at all levels of the world as we know it.

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Each of these fields is not discrete, but neither do whole. they come together into Instead, fields graft onto any kind other fields of coherent and separate themselves from yet other fields according to the play of the various fields and the previous grafts within them. And whereas one could call nature the “network of all networks,” or the field of all fields, this concept really makes no sense, for, like “Being,” it is only an attempt to ground the fields of play in a totalizing concept of which man, who is also always localized in his own fields of play, could have no knowledge.

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Totalization and nature do not fit within the same conceptual field, so there is no reason to force them into an arbitrary relationship.

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on the microlevel, our various fields of play better resemble the spike model than the continuity model; it is the macrolevel that makes us think of smoothly running machines which are in fact models of continual rupturings and graftings among many fields.

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The centrality of play has not been ignored simply because we operate on a “work’” model or a centered or grounded model; it has been ignored because it is incompatible with such a model. To see life as ex-static is to reverse the directions of the models, to see a multiplicity of fields characterized by ruptures, ex-stases.

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those moments when the “I" becomes thematized stand out precisely because they are reflexive, precisely be- cause they are the relatively few moments in any given day when we thematize our own specific situation and call atten- tion to it. Thus, when we think back, the moments most obvi- ously marked out are the ones we have already thought about.

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The traditional theories of continuity are based on self-presence, on awareness of self, on reflexivity. But if most of our waking (and sleeping) life is spent in playful activity that is not reflexive at all, this notion of continuity is rather weak to begin with,

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That the person who puts the door on the car in the final assembly does not see the finished car is thus the norm rather than the exception within production of any kind.

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No matter which grid we choose to place on the phenomenon of play as it mani- fests itself in our lives, the grid itself quickly breaks down pre- cisely because play is not easily localizable in any but an arbi- trary way. Our attempts to localize it, then, are bound to seem naive and simpleminded, for the fact is that we need a new way to categorize experiences if we are to deal with them at this level.

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3: Desire

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Desire as I wish to consider it occurs as an aspect of the activity of play. If play is the activity, and production is the result of the activity, desire is what provides the orientation and motivation for play.

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But because true sexual desire has little to do with an object or the possession of one—in that sexual desire is instead an activity which produces in various ways—desire as lack does not suffice and has never been a suitable descrip- tion of what sexual desire is.

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Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject: there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.

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it is often, perhaps even gen- erally, the case that active syntheses immediately precede playful activity and give it direction.

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force the manifold flows of desire into the mold of a unified subject is indeed to repress and artificially force the channeling of desire in an undesirable way

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Desire, then, is not lack but fulness; it does not produce illusion, at least when it is ‘‘healthy’” desire, but the real; and it is not the play of subject and object, but the play which produces subject and object as residua.

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a situation in which learning the rules is never enough to be able to play the game well.

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the game must be allowed to over- rule one’s expectation of it.

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The belief that the theory of relativity can be confirmed or denied by experimental evidence, while the thought of the ontological difference cannot, is pure nonsense. If our play with the idea of the ontological difference convinces us that it is a more accurate description of certain phenomena in the world than was the previous description, then the graft will restructure the fields of play with which it is concerned; if it does not, its role will be minor.

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is to ignore the potential violence involved in any situation which has imitation at its center, and most human situations presumably do.

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Girard's view leads to the most violent kind of rupture with the world and other men, whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s view leads to communion and continuity.

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The real problem at the end of the event, then, is not that the violence that goes along with imitation and the ecstasy that goes along with the play of the world are so different but that they are so much alike. Indeed, as a qualitative experience, they are identical; only the interpretation and the consequences differ.

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When a Sade or a Bataille comes along, we either reject their work as beastly or nod and agree that there is something there and promptly forget about it.

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through his dialogues Socrates himself is really making the last strong argument for the centrality of play that we will see for millennia. He may be arguing against Dionysian tendencies in favor of Apollonian ones, but he is still willing to play along with the pre-Socratics, and he is still willing to put his life into question on the issue of the centrality of the play of discourse. That he is so resolutely rational or logical is important, but that rationality and logic are ultimately subordi- nate to the play of discourse itself is more important.

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One has to extend the boundaries of self-expression farther and farther, but the result is ever more rigorously the same: the selves look more and more alike. A banal example is the T-shirt phenomenon, in which one has a saying, an advertising slogan, or a picture of a famous person emblazoned on a jersey to assert one’s differ- ence. Unfortunately, the difference is immediately obscured by the fact that the medium—T-shirts with slogans—is the same, so one is really only asserting similitude, not difference.

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When Derrida talks about the end of man, he is talking about the end of identity, which never actually existed in the first place.

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One might offer the counterpart to that maxim as follows: Never treat play solely as an end in itself, but also as a means to an end.

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The whole process is like a continual shell game fueled by the fires of mimetic appropriation: one continues to look under everybody else’s shells for the kernel of play that would give value to his life, but he always forgets that there are only shells, no kernels, that it is the play between shells that provides value

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Technically, then, it is the orientation toward imitation that seems most important, not only because produc- tive imitation need not be disguised—though this is crucial, in that it is the need to disguise the imitation which increases the violence inherent in the other model—but also because an understanding of imitation provides one with the openness to imitate along with an awareness of the consequences of dis- guised imitation. Imitation loses its threatening guise from a productive standpoint, and the absence of threat is made clearer by the fact that one need not worry about imitation leading to identity, for identity itself is not possible.

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this is nevertheless a very specific kind of violence we are referring to, and accepting its presence in the play of production does not mean that violence in general need be countenanced as a necessary offshoot of play. The tendency to embrace violence for precisely such reasons seems all too frequent

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There is a difference between the mixture of violence and union involved in the play of production and the kind of violence connected neither to play nor to union but to the sheer dominance of difference.

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4: Language

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The interconnections between these fields serve to mark out the freedom and limitations of the play of language and constitute it as a specific field while also limiting the potential productions of language. Indeed, it is only because language, like any other field of play, is productive and yet limited in this way that it can be considered a field at all.

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The flexibility of language allows it to change the play of its differences as other fields change, and it is possible for the grafts within language to effect grafts in other fields, but both series of grafts must constantly accommodate themselves to each other, and it is at this level of accommodation that language has its referentiality.

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dead languages failed to respond to grafts in other fields of play and became instruments of less and less flexibility and applicability until they were incapable of responding to grafts initiated within the play of language itself.

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Language, as we normally use and are used by it, comes to be defined as any other field of play: first, it is a field of play, and second, it is free and bound within its play with other fields of production. Because language saturates so many other fields of play, its grafting and enregistering powers take on great significance; it is free to mark in every domain known to man, and it can open new domains to man through its play. Its freedom, then, is in a sense inexhaustible, if not infinite. Thus, until the play of language generated it, there was no field of play like the unconscious, and no larger field of play like psy- chology; there was only an opacity man could not see through.

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play whose freedom is bound by the graft- ing processes already at work

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boundaries delineated by other fields of play that language is constantly playing into and out of.

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One could, as with the “atom,” admit at the outset that the ‘“‘unconscious” is nothing more than a difference from ‘‘consciousness,” for this is certainly true. Nevertheless, the field of play set in motion by the conscious/ unconscious graft, or the id/ego/superego graft, applies to a network of phenomena that does exist.

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doubtless to make incredibly crude markings in a complex field of play; but those crude markings make it possible to open up the field

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Finally, that language has such power in other fields of play, and especially in the larger natural fields, confirms that its own activity does not take place in a vacuum. Indeed, if it did, and if its play truly were free, it would be a power- less field because it would be incapable of producing any- thing through its grafts. It gains its power by being bound

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An instrumentalist view begins with the assumption that lan- guage is the dominant force in the world, that it is through its manipulation that man creates the fictions through which he builds his world.

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instrumental language, as with any other possible use, is subject to confirmation by experi- ence; and although instrumentally, as with any other use of language, one has the ability to shape the orientation of the people involved, that shaping process is not so overpowering as to dominate the brute facts of existence.

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Derrida, in emphasizing the freeness of the play and in speaking of the game without security, is ignoring that there are consequences, that lack of security does mean risk.

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When Derrida argues that there is no longer any truth, he may be right in terms of any kind of essentialist, originary truth, but he is wrong in saying that there is no truth what- soever.

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the method itself has now become more constraining than liberating, and the reconstruction that is part of every decon- struction begins to look more and more the same: it is not moving in new directions but recapitulating the sureness of the old ones.

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instrumentalist tendencies which ultimately work against his notion of a decentered world. He would say to us, ‘“Play freely,” but he leaves us only the “dif- ferance” between signifiers, and that is not enough with which to play freely.

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enregisterment for its own sake is as absurd as ‘“art for art's sake,” and doomed to the same kind of quick death. In cutting itself off from other kinds of produc- tion, it ends up producing less and less itself until it reveals its own lack and begins to play into other fields once again.

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We thus need to move finally into the process of language as fulness, as the expression of man’'s desire to play produc- tively and fully,

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“The Question concerning Technology,”²

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This is to concede from the very beginning that all language is funda- mentally instrumental, but it is also to argue that its chief in- strumentality comes from listening to it rather than using it as a tool for specific purposes.

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The hermeneutic circle—the movement from a specific orientation to the play within language that generates the larger consequences of the specific orientation, and then changes the specific orientation in terms of the larger consequences—is obviously the means through which man has been able to produce what he has produced over the span of his existence.

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the results of this kind of process short-circuit the play of language. And whereas the results of the short-circuiting may seem innocuous as well, there will come a time when they may not, when we arrive at the point where the differences of a computer are much more important than they are today.

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Although language must at a certain level play us, we cannot trust providentially in the play of difference to produce what is desirable.

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5: The Aesthetic

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Likewise, in say- ing that play is the midway point between law and exigency, Schiller is only repeating at a more abstract level the earlier dichotomies, which we would reverse by saying that play is where law and exigency work out their relationship through continual play.

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The relations between sensuous energy and form that are articulated here are a part of any description of play.

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why play itself is indissolubly connected to the aesthetic, and to what Schiller calls Beauty.

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The aesthetic is not that location where reason and sense come together; it is that location out of which sense and reason are continually generated.

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metaphysical distinguishing mark of the beautiful is that it closes the gap between the idea and the appearance.

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what is more important is that the beautiful marks that place where idea and appearance are made, where they begin their grafting processes and their pro- ductive lives.

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human production of the real depends on the aesthetic mode, and that all good production maintains its connection to it.

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the mood into which the aesthetic “transports our spirit.”” That is, despite the fact that all our modes of understanding depend to a certain degree upon ex- stasis, on being outside of the self in a metaphorical way, the intense feeling which generally accompanies this ex-stasis, what we call ecstasy, seems the farthest thing away from a rational mode of understanding that modern man can think of.

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But why not think of ecstasy as a manifestation of desiring- production rather than desire as lack? Why not consider the feeling involved in such a case as a tentative mark of the valid- ity of the experience involved?

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whether that sense translates itself into their everyday life, or whether that sense is ever translated to others, is something that lies beyond the feeling of intensity that accompanies the experience.

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advancements in scientific knowledge that were generated by an ecstatic coming-together of details that produced the solution seem- ingly out of the air.

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the literature and the other arts of our culture have their own validating processes,

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the value is demon- strated not only by the fact that people continue to read the piece, but more important by the fact that it is productive in our world, generating new grafts

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both the arts and the sciences are ineradicably connected to the truth of their fields, that ultimately this view of the fields does not negate any notion of truth but instead makes the notion of truth possible and conceivable.

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Validity and verification have always been determined by effectiveness, and effectiveness has always meant effects, that is, grafts which alter the play within a field.

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Violence too is an ecstatic state, one capable of generating its own powerful feelings and consequences, and we would be foolish to misunderstand the connection between violence and ecstasy.

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one needs to say not only that the theory (or the painting) presents some kind of harmony and that the person involved with it derives pleasurable feelings from seeing that harmony, but that he is somehow participating in that harmony, making the field of the theory or the painting his own field, or rather, recognizing part of his own field in the work. This means that beauty is not something objectively apprehended, for that would eliminate the notion of participation. Nor is it some- thing merely subjectively felt, though feeling is a supplement to the process; beauty is the mark which establishes new con- nections between or within fields and which confirms the validity of that marking at the same time,

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depending on whether we wish to speak from an aesthetic, an ontological, or an epistemological perspective, we will adopt the marks of beauty-truth-ecstasy, production- consumption-enregisterment or understanding-interpretation- application.

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the modes of understanding I have presented—the subjective, the objective, and the playful—are merely the counterparts of consumption, enregisterment, and production.

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my view would argue that the very problem of ontotheology, or of most of Western thought, has been its continual attempt to try to transcend the fields of play in which man is involved, and that this view no longer is, and never really was, tenable.

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The purpose of this game is to entertain ideas which one will ultimately test by putting them into play in the context of their specific fields;

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it does not follow that we ought to put an end to the objective altogether, even if that were possible. We must simply learn to place it within its proper context and use it when we can and as productively as we can.

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That the subjective came to be relegated to the category of the aesthetic suggests that it has only grudg- ingly been acknowledged as something which cannot be done away with altogether, as something to be held in check by forcing its effects into a narrow category.

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If the objective allows us to test the integrity of the “‘objects” in our fields of play, the subjective allows us to test the integrity of our own location.

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the intensity of the feeling that is produced along with the production is relative to the significance of the graft taking place.

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this feeling of ecstasy is a mark of our full and total participation within a given field of play, a participation that suggests the kind of harmony Schiller and others find to be the hallmark of the aesthetic.

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On a local level, Einstein was only producing a graft within his own field of understanding; that it happened to be a graft which greatly affected the larger field of physics itself is significant in the larger view, but the event itself begins as a very localized one.

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The productiveness of the graft itself is something that will be tautologically determined by its effectiveness; the results of the productivity will either appear, or they won't, and as such there is no point in trying to measure them.

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aesthetics is the proper domain for the arts precisely because aesthetics is ultimately the study of playful production, and the arts are most clearly informative on that matter.

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I am not referring to the need for the scientist to recollect in tranquillity upon his general relationship with the world; I am speaking about the need to consider the relationship be- tween a given experiment, the fields of play in which it is involved, and—within those fields of play—the likely results from the experiment itself. The same can be said for techno- logical productions and for any other human production.

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the age of science without responsibility is gone. We must attend to that fact, and the best way of attend- ing to it is by continually recognizing science’s connection to the aesthetic.

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6: The Socioeconomic

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how play on a localized level generates the larger social and economic systems of which it is necessarily a part.

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so the bureaucracies come to see their coding of the production of surplus value as an activity which goes on for its own sake; they code things to perpetuate the play of their coding, not to create an axiomatic which best distributes the surplus value within the system.

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even if we take the most neutral view of the beginnings of this activity, that the bureaucracies which are established to axiomatize the codes of production do so, or attempt to do so, in the interests of the people within the system, their goal quickly becomes to axiomatize the production in terms of their own activity, and this ultimately leads not to greater and greater productivity but to an increasingly “violent and artificial” re- territorializing process which has no more than its own per- petuation in mind.

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any field of play man sets in motion will have similar tendencies; that is, any time a field is established and has the opportunity to territorialize a field in its own code, its tendency will be ultimately to see its role as the perpetuation of its role.

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the tendency toward overaxiomatization generates the tendency to resist the intrusions of other fields of play onto the ones man has axiomatized. The direction is toward stasis, then, and although stasis is never really possible, the attempt to achieve it creates resistances that lead to arbitrary and violent kinds of coding within the field,

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the capitalist system appears to be the first system aware of its own activity,

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even more rigid and all-encompassing than earlier codings, only this time everything is coded in terms of capital. It creates the illusion of choice and free codes while absorbing every choice and code into the body of capital itself.

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“Imitate me / Don’t imitate me’ applies to both situations. This double bind maintains a very tenuous existence in the capitalist code, because the code must continually be reinscribing new flows into its axiomatic.

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freedom from those constraints and from their artificial reinscription process, but it is also a bondage to those laws of play which govern every field in which one plays.

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This may well be one resolution of the schizoid nature of capitalism, but its cost is great in that it requires one to give up an entire field—self-consciousness—in order better to live within other fields of play.

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places all of those things considered purely nega- tive in one category, called the capitalist but really resembling something more like the human, in the sense of that which dif- ferentiates us from the animals—Ilack, law, signifier, i.e., self- consciousness; and it places all of the positive things into what could only be called the natural—production, desire, free flows. It thus refuses to see that, in the human domain and in all of those fields of play in which man is involved, the two areas are ineradicably dependent on each other.

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in everyday life the axiomatic itself can func- tion without the presence of a bureaucracy as the individuals within the system interpret the choices available to them. The bureaucratic structures are merely the most obvious manifes- tation of the activity that constantly goes on at the individual level.

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basic problem resides in the social field's almost total saturation with the interpretative framework of the capitalist system.

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the capitalist mode of production and interpretation is no longer adequate to our understanding of the world.

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capitalism works well when the lines of production and consumption can be clearly, if artificially, es- tablished both in the lives of individuals and in a geopolitical sense.

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A multinational corporation does not define its position in any national or geographical way; its interests are simply to situate the capitalist field with its productive network, and it will do so at practically any cost. But it is not just that multinational corporations function in this way: gov- ernments do too.

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one can no longer speak of the *national interest,” for the national interest has now become global, defined not by one location on the map versus another location, but by a series of networks and grafts that have locations all over the globe, networks so byzantine in complexity that decision making in the old free state/socialist state mode becomes impossible.

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still using the worn-out ‘‘balance-of-power” structure in a sit- uation where it no longer applies.

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the economy, which seemed decentralized because of the vast proliferation of busi- nesses, was really centralized by the flow of capital

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although capitalism’s need to obscure produc- tive desire in order to stimulate consumptive desire is in itself enough to explain the subterranean life of productive play, we should also remember that it has really been a part of the ontotheological system from the beginning, or at least since Plato.

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The real problem involved here goes far beyond capitalism; the real problem is that despite thousands of years of experimentation and development, mankind still does not know how to produce economic and social fields of play which are fields of free play, not in Derrida’s sense, but in the sense that they are always open to the new productions which change the field and make it more adequate to its everchanging context.

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should be no doubt either that any system which rests on the utopian rhetoric that Marxist societies do can possibly hope to become adequate as long as they impose a goal on their activity from the beginning.

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Short of some kind of utopian vision, there seems to be no way out of the dilemma, just as there is no easy way out of the dilemma of violence generated by desire as lack. There are no easy schemes to eliminate violence, and there are no easy schemes to eliminate the tendency toward struc- tural rigidity within the social and economic fields of play.

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natural fields of play are constantly producing new grafts and continually changing as a result of these new grafts.

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nature is value-free, so it adapts without choices and ambiguities; from our perspective the pollutants man has generated may have had serious negative effects on any number of fields, but within those fields the result is only change.

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How is it, then, that we can accept such changes—and the flexibility and adaptability they suggest—within a science like physics and yet be unable to do the same within the social and economic fields? Is there anything intrinsically different about their axiomatics that makes them more resistant to grafts?

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A crucial difference between the fields is that physics seems more capable of escaping its history,

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the atoms themselves do not, for us, carry a history along with them,

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It is the unpredictability at the individual level that a flexible socioeconomic field must continually adapt itself to and take account of in a way which makes its play much more problematic.

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because the real power within the network resides within the produc- tion of space and time as they are controlled through the ex- change of capital, one must alter the entire axiomatic in order to generate any change in the mode of investment.

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no one can control the flow of capital, or rather, it is in control of its own flow, and it chooses to flow as freely and as fast as possible.

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we are headed for the point at which time and space will have been chopped into such small pieces that their multiplicity will again become obvious,

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I have no program for action which can be derived from the principles of the play of production, nor do I necessarily see the possibility of formulating this kind of program, for the purpose in itself would suggest a totalizing tendency incon- sistent with the play of production.

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But the very conception of ‘less is more” at least begins to point in the right direction, begins to articulate a descrip- tion of our position within the fields of play we inhabit, a description that is fruitful in its modesty.

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the problem is that this view fails to assess what a standard of living really is, and hence has not escaped the axiomatic that has generated the problems

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at a certain point the production of differ- ence leads to the inability to make choices, the inability to value anything at all. Thus, the first premise of the ‘‘less is more’ position is that there should be less, not more, difference produced.

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multiplicity has value only to the extent that the differences one is confronted with at any one time are multiple but not infinite.

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practically speaking, mankind itself is finite and needs multiplicities that are more narrowly circumscribed.

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ask whether money is really a sufficient medium of exchange for the production of space and time.

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a monetary system that would somehow correspond more adequately to the play of production itself;

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The production of more space and time has value only to the extent that that time and space can generate their own productivity; if they can't, it is really counterproductive to produce them in the first place.

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7: The Ethical

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the question of values as it presents itself to man when he has come to realize that values do not inhere in any object or any subject,

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Nietzsche himself never intended this transvaluation of values to be simply moral relativity— where any choice can be justified because there is no more reason for one choice than another—yet those who have followed him have generally been content to argue that the word “values” no longer has any meaning, and so, as with the word “truth,” we ought to dispense with it altogether.

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any system of values that can be derived from the play of production in all of its various fields will not find the value inherent in the subject or the object, for they are no more than marks within a given field of play

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the play of production itself has no other purpose than to produce playfully. There is no sense in which we can interpret the play within any field as leading to some ultimate point,

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the existentialist view suffers from its need for a subject to make those values by which he should live his life, and inasmuch as it cannot escape its orientation toward the subject, the making of values that existentialism outlines is only one more example of the ontotheological view we are trying to avoid.

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I am attempting to develop or describe an ecological value system for man, not only so he can learn to produce effectively but also so his productions on all other levels are effective, including those fields of play which comprise man's interaction with other men.

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echoing Nietzsche, we really must begin at a location which joyfully affirms the value of playful production.

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to begin with playful production is to mark out the human in a positive rather than a negative way—we express his basic activity in terms of fulness rather than lack, of fulfilling desire as opposed to desire based on endless consumption.

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focusing on playful production means attentiveness to the moment in which we live,

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Producing, broadly construed, is the one thing that we know provides pleasure for us.

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back to the separation between “work” and ‘‘enjoyment,” a separation that has never made a great deal of sense, insofar as it leads to ‘“‘mindless’ or ‘‘valueless’ pleasures and to work that has no intrinsic value. That pleasure or joy is a supplement to production ought not to be something negative, but some- thing which gives added value to the work itself. That produc- tion is pleasurable is probably as close as we can hope to come for some kind of intrinsic value in our activity.

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pleasure can never be pursued for its own sake, that pleasure is always a partial result of a productive activity. What passes for pleasure in our culture today and what really is pleasurable are too often totally unrelated.

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benefits and costs are inseparable, and the fact is that costs have always been determined in relation to benefits. It is simply a question of to whom the benefits should accrue.

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Choices must begin playfully simply because we cannot forecast ade- quately from an objective viewpoint the consequences of our choices

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When laws and social structures become increasingly byzantine because one graft after another is added without thought, the same results ultimately occur: even the most flexible system becomes more and more rigid with the ceaseless supplements to bad thought or no thought,

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Sunset laws, for example, are as essential to a thriving society as is winter to nature,

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What we have are social fields that try to breed the risk out of life; what we need are social structures that try to breed risk into life, for risk is only the willingness to assume a playful perspective.

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If we start with the play of production, and if we want to develop an ethics from it, risk must be its centerpiece, for all playful production involves risk.

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eliminating everyday risks makes possible those more important risks that put us on the line in different ways.

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to focus on risk is to beg the question of what it is that should be risked,

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risk is involved in the hermeneutic circle as much as is any- thing else: one finds out which risks are worthy only by placing oneself at risk to begin with.

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Risks involved in a sub- jective or objective view are always organized around a center, which is why they are a problem in the first place, for as long as there is a center, there is also a periphery which is less important or more capable of being “sacrificed” for the center.

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play is always only play if something is really at stake,

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The residual negativity of daily life accumulates from the sense that somehow we should not have to put up with the reversals of expectation that we face so regularly, that these struggles are the result of our inability to understand or to perceive clearly. This may be true in some cases, yet much of what passes for a lack of clarity is really the ongoing process of grafting, which always involves us in the production of new enregisterments that could not have been made without the graft, in that it is also enregisterment at the same time. In this way, a great many of our reversals of expectation are really the result of the production of the new, the production of the real, and could as such not be anticipated by clear thinking.

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We are in an apparently paradoxical situation which argues that play is not giving oneself up to chance, that play is giving oneself up to the play; that as a result, the playing-out is not predictable beforehand, and that as a further consequence one must place oneself at risk. The risk is not a result of chance, but of a lack of chanciness; it is a result of the possibility of finding something to be true that one has previ- ously not found so.

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fear for the ‘“self,” for that “identity” which supposedly defines us. Seen as identity, in play we always place the whole of that identity into question, and that seems too great a risk to take.

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Once again, the center of identity, the supposed ground of certitude, ends up being one of those things which most mitigates against our pro- ductive activity. It moves us away from play because it makes the risks seem greater than they actually are; it moves us toward a security of identity which works against productivity.

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identity loses its value as an opening onto fields of play and hence loses its value as a particular location.

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we have a world defined in terms of its activities—something close to an American view of things anyway, in that we are the only culture which insistently asks, “What do you do?”’

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What we are really doing, of course, is keeping the cash flow going, and that might have the residual effect of keeping some people employed. Any system built upon such an axiomatic is bound to be grossly inefficient

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make the flow of capital attend not to the number of products but to production itself,

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The goal of a playful ethics is not to allow each of us to express ourselves fully so long as that expression harms no one, nor is it to subscribe to a series of unilateral perspectives on the world. It begins with the premise that there is no such thing as self-expression, that every self- expression is really an expression of an idealized other. Nor is there really any self to express,

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It is, on the contrary, the continual absorption of the human into the natural that we see going on around us, and only this view will provide our productions with any meaning.

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Can there be self-consciousness without a self? Surely the answer is yes, although perhaps a better term for it would be “location-consciousness,” inasmuch as it is never really a self we are conscious of in the first place but a loca- tion within a certain field of activity

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When we speak of self-consciousness, we are merely referring to a field of play that reflexively takes note of its activity from a particular location.

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How can one even speak of an ethics when one eliminates the self toward which the ethics is directed?

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