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The image of artistic technique is indeed exact: the center bet is a means, a device, for creating "interesting," "deep" matches · 08.04.19, 10:03

Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play,” in The Interpretation of Cultures

“The Balinese attempt to create an interesting, if you will, “deep,” match by making the center bet as large as possible so that the cocks matched will be as equal and as fine as possible, and the outcome, thus, as unpredictable as possible. They do not always succeed. Nearly half the matches are relatively trivial, relatively uninteresting-in my borrowed terminology, “shallow”- affairs. But that fact no more argues against my interpretation than the fact that most painters, poets, and playwrights are mediocre argues against the view that artistic effort is directed toward profundity and, with a certain frequency, approximates it. The image of artistic technique is indeed exact: the center bet is a means, a device, for creating “interesting,” “deep” matches, not the reason, or at least not the main reason, why they are interesting, the source of their fascination, the substance of their depth. The question why such matches are interesting-indeed, for the Balinese, exquisitely absorbing-takes us out of the realm of formal concerns into more broadly sociological and social-psychological ones, and to a less purely economic idea of what “depth” in gaming amounts to.”

The sea of the fomerly inconceivable. . . did not bestow the promised happiness · 08.03.17, 13:24

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory p.1

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. The forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously or unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new possibilities that reflection confronts. In many regards, expansion appears as contraction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed consumed the categories in the name of that forwhich it was undertaken. More was constantly pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo; everywhere artists rejoiced less over the newly won realm of freedom than that they immediately sought once again after ostensible yet scarecely adequate order. For absolute fredom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole. In it the place of art became uncertain. The autonomy it achieved, after havnig freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nourished by the idea of humanity. As society became ever less a human one, this autonomy was shattered. Drawn from the ideal of humanity, art’s consitituent elements withered by art’s own law of movement. Yet art’s autonomy remains irrevocable. All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function—of which art itself is uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty—are doomed.

Adventures in Narrative Theory · 08.03.12, 11:13

David Graeber, Lost People, pp 131-132.

. . . the more exalted a group or status, the more their typical activities will tend to take dramatic form, once which lends itself to being told as stories afterward. The political domain is usually the most dramatic of all.

Another way to say this is that the more powerful a person or group, the more their archetypal activities are likely to resemble games. Many years ago, Johan Huizinga (1940) suggested that any number of common human activities tend to be organized like games. Games, he pointed out, are always characterized by certain basic features. There is always a (a) field of action, which is arbitrarily marked off from the rest of the world in space and time, (b) arbitrary rules, which apply within that field, and (c) a series of players, whose actions are motivated by (d) some goal they are not certain to attain.

What I find especially interesting about this forumlation is that its basic features preciely parallel a certain tradition of thinking about the relation of narrative and human action, one which goes back to Aristotle, reappears in Bakhtin, and whose most notable recent exemplar is probably Paul Ricouer. A story, according to this tradition, begins by posing some problem and ends with its resolution. Stories too are always characterized by certain features. There is always (a) a world, or field of action, marked off in space or time , (b) certain arbitrary rules which define the sorts of action possible in them. There are also necessarily, (c) a set of actors, and (d) some goal, which motivates them, but which they are not guaranteed of being able to attain. The two models have exactly the same form.

This not only makes it easier to understand what it means to say that certain types of action are intrinsiclally “narrativizable”; it also provides a clue as to why such narratives can serve as such powerful instruments of ideology—that is, why they not only determine who is an actor and who is not, but make it easier for those whoare not to accept this situation.”

being lost, being stolen, being bitten · 08.01.29, 06:40

Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play p.160-161

The typical actions in orally told stories by young children include beting lost, being stolen, being bitten, dying, being stepped on, being angry, calling the police, running away, or falling down.

. . .

Told by a four-year-old boy:

Once there was a dragon who went poo poo on a house and the house broke
then when the house broke the people died
and when the people died their bones came out and broke and got together again and turned into a skeleton
and then the skeletons came along and scared the people out of the town
and then when all the people got scared out of the town then
skeleton babies were born
and then everyone called it skeleton town
and when they called it skeleton town the people came back and then they got scared away again
and then when they all got scared away again the skeletons died no one came to the town
so there was no people in that town ever again.

The Game Notion of Legitimate Opposition · 08.01.24, 11:25

Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play p.97

The selling of sports, however, although it often resulted in the direct ludic identity of the imperial sports teams, also led the colonials or Third World people to adopt the rhetoric of game superiority (called winning) that went with playing those sports; in the long run they sometimes successfully contested their overlords for that same glory. It is another paradox that the British imperial powers should use contestive games to sell their own rhetoric identity of moral gentlemanliness when they were also, less wittingly, selling the game notion of legitimate opposition.

Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play p.98

Perhaps it can be said that whenever one is taught and beaten at games by another group—whoever they are, masters, aliens, foreigners, adults, gangs, or the opposite sex—one’s own group frequently develops a desire to contest that superiority on the same playing field. This opposition is a public transcript widely shared by the world’s underdogs, and indeed it is a breach in the hegemony of the dominant groups, even though the playing of the same games is itself consistent with such hegemony (Scott, 1990). Many authors have seen the selling of sports as a facet of the extension of imperial hegemony or the capitalist way of life, work, and consumption. The problem is that the same imperial way of life in some places permitted different social classes or ethnic groups to compete for hegemony at least within the ludic sphere. And such participation is at the very least a form of enactive subjunctivity, with all its implied optimism and fantasies about the possibility of success.

Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art’s nature · 08.01.13, 20:30

Joseph Kusuth, “Art after Philosophy”

“The “value” of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying “what they added to the conception of art” or what wasn’t there before they started. Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art’s nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneself with the handed-down “language” of traditional art, as this activity is based on the assumption that there is only one way of framing art propositions. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly related to “creating” new propositions.”

Activation; authorship; community · 08.01.04, 10:30

Claire Bishop “Viewers as Producers,” in Participation p.13

“Recurrently, calls for an art of participation tend to be allied to one or all of the following agendas. The first concerns the desire to create an active subject, one who will be empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation. The hope is that the newly-emancipated subjects of participation will find themselves able to determine their own social and political reality. An aesthetic of participation therefore derives legitimacy from a (desired) causal relationship between the experience of a work of art and individual/collective agency. The second argument concerns authorship. The gesture of ceding some or all authorial control is conventionally regarded as more egalitarian and democratic than the creation of a work by a single artist, while shared production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of greater risk and unpredictability. Collaborative creativity is therefore understood both to emerge from, and to produce, a more positive and non-hierarchical social model. The third issue involves a perceived crisis in community and collective responsibility. This concern has become more acute since the fall of Communism, although it take its lead from a tradition of Marxist thought that indicts the alienating and isolating effects of capitalism. One of the main impetuses behind participatory art has therefore been a restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning.

These three concerns – activation; authorship; community – are the most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic attempts to encourage participation in art since the 1960s. It is significant that all three appear in the writing of Guy Debord, co-founder of the Situationist International, since it is invariably against the backdrop of his critique of capitalist ‘spectacle’ that debates on participation come to be staged.”

Commodity Fetishism · 08.01.03, 08:45

David Graeber, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value p. 65

“Commodity fetishism….is the result, above all, of the fact that the market creates a vast rupture between the factories in which the commodities are being produced, and the private homes in which most are finally consumed. If a commodity—a futon, a video cassette, a box of talcum powder—fulfills a human need, it is because human beings have intentionally designed it in order to do so; they have taken raw materials and, by adding their strength and intelligence, shaped it to fulfill those needs. The object, then, embodies human intentions. This is why consumers want to buy it. But because of the peculiar, anonymous nature of a market system, that whole history becomes invisible from the consumer’s point of view. From her perspective, then, it looks as if the value of an object—embodied in its ability to satisfy her wants—is an aspect of the product itself. All those intentions seem to be absorbed into the physical form of the object itself, this being all that she can see. In other words, she too is confusing her own (partial, subjective) perspective with the (total, objective) nature of the situation itself, and as a result, seeing objects as having human powers and properties. This is precisely the sort of thing—the attribution of subjective qualities to objects—that Piaget argues is typical of childhood egocentrism as well.”

What is political action? · 07.12.18, 14:21

David Graeber, Lost People, p. 130.

The nice thing about anomalous cases is that they force one to rethink one’s definitions. It seems to me in this context at least, instead of starting from the question “What is politics?—since that immediately evokes the idea of a political sphere—it would be more useful to ask “What is political action? What is it about an act that enables one to say it is political?”

The most obvious response would be tht actions are political in so far as they are intended to influence the actions of others (or, perhaps, just in so far as they do, because something can be unintentionally political). The problem with this is that it would mean that, with the possible exception of certain purely technical actions, all actions have some political component. This may not be a bad way of looking at things—but even when one says “Everything is political,” one normally means something more. One implies that one’s actions have a broader significance, that they relate to more general issues. So let me suggest a refinement. As a minimal definition, political action is action meant to influence others who arenot physically present when the action is being done. This is not to sa it can’t be intended to influence people who are physically present; it is to say its effects are not limited to that. It is action that is meant to be recounted, narrated, or in some other way represented to other people afterward; or anyway, it is political in so far as it is.

The world we inhabit is abundant beyone our wildest imagination. · 07.11.05, 16:22

Paul Feyerabend Conquest of Abundance p. 5

The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies. The simplest human action varies from one person and occasion to the next—how else would we recognize our friends only from their gate, posture, voice, and divine their changing moods? Narrowly defined subjects such as thirteenth-century Parisian theology, crowd control, late medieval Umbrian art are full of pitfalls and surprises, thus proving that there is no limit to any phenomenon, however restricted. “For him, ” writes François Jacob of his teacher Hovelaque, “a bone as simple in appearance as the clavicle became a fantastic landscape whose mountains and valleys could be traversed ad infinitum.”

Only a tiny fragment of this abundance affects our minds. This is a blessing, not a drawback. A superconscious organism would not be superwise, it would be paralyzed. ”

chromo books · 07.11.04, 11:21

Performance's only life is in the present. · 07.09.20, 16:02

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, p146

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.

The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy are enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the “now” to which performance addresses its deepest questions valued. (This is why the now is supplemented and buttressed by the documenting camera, the video archive.) Performance ocurs over a time which will not be repeated. It can be perfomed again but this repetition itself marks it as “different.” The document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present.”

For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience · 07.09.18, 12:16

John Dewey, Art as Experience, p.54

For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent. And his (sic) creation must include relations comparable to those which the orginal producer underwent. These are not the same in any literal sense. But with the perceiver, as with the artist, thre must be an ordering of elements of the whole that is in form, although not in details, the same as the process of organization the creator of the work consciously experienced. Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art.

The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationship with other spheres of collective experience. · 07.09.02, 14:15

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, pp 27-27

The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationship with other spheres of collective experience. The confusion introduced by this notion has, it seems to me, two major forms. Both of them, without analysing it, rely on the contradiction constituative of the aesthetic regime of the arts, which makes art into an autonomous form of life and thereby sets down, at one and the same time, the autonomy of art and its identification with a moment in life’s process of self-formation. The two major variants of the discourse on modernity identified simply with the autonomy of art, an ‘anti-mimetic’ revolution in art identical with the conquest of the pure form of art finally laid bare. Each individual art woudl thus asert the pure potential of art by exploring the capabilities of its specific medium. Poetic or literary modernity would explore the capabilities of a language diverted from its communicational uses. Pictorial modernity would bring painting back to its distinctive feature: coloured pigment and a two-dimensional surface. Musical modernity would be indentitfied with the language of twelve sounds, set free from any analogy with expressive language, etc. Furthermore these specific forms of modernity would be in a relationship of distant analogy with a political modernity susceptible to being identified depending on the time period, with revolutionalry radicality or with the sober and disenchanted modernity of good republican government. The main feature of what is called the ‘crisis of art’ is the overwhelming defeat of this simple modernist paradigm, which is forever more disantd from the mixtures of genres and mediums as well as from the numerous political possibilities inherent in the arts’ contemporary forms.

This overwhelming defeat is obviously overdetermined by the modernist paradigm’s second major form, which might be called modernatism. I mean by this the identification of forms from the aesthetic regime of the arts with forms that accomplish a task or fulfill a destiny specific to modernity. At the root of this identification there is a specific interpretation of the structural and generative contradiction of aesthetic ‘form.’ It is, in this case, the determination of art qua form and self-formation of life that is valorized. The starting point, Schiller’s notion of the aesthetic education of man, constitutes an unsurpassable reference point. It is this notion that established the idea that omination and servitude are, in the first place, part of an ontological distribution (the activity of thought verses the passivity of sensible matter). It is also this notion that defined a neutral state, a state of dual cancellation, where the activity of thought and sensible receptivity become a single reality. They constitute a sort of new region of being – the region of free play and appearance – that makes it possible to conceive of the equality whose direct materialization, according to Schiller, was shown to be impossible by the French Revolution. It is this specific mode of living in the sensible world that must be developed b ‘aesthetic education’ in order to train men [sic] susceptible to live in a free political community. The idea of modernity as a time devoted to the material realization of a humanity still latent in mankind was constructed on this foundation. It can be said, regarding this point, that the ‘aesthetic revolution’ produced a new idea of political revolution: the material realization of a common humanity still only existing as an idea. This is how Schiller’s ‘aesthetic state’ became the ‘aesthetic programme’ of German Romanticism, the programme summarized in the rough draft written together by Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling: the material realization of unconditional freedom and pure thought in common forms of life and belief. It is this paradigm of aesthetic autonomy that became the new paradigm for revolution, and it subsequently allowed for the brief but decisive encounter between the artisans of the marxist revolution and the artisans of forms for a new way of life. The failure of this revolution determined the destiny – in two phases – of modernatism. At first, artistic modernatism, in its authentic revoltionary potential for hope and defiance, was set against the degeneration of political revoltion. Surrealism and the Frankfurt School were the principle vehicles for this counter-modernity. The failure of political revolution was later conveived of as the failure of its ontologico-aesthetic model. Modernity thus became something like a fatal destiny: the essence of technology according to Heidegger, the revoltionary severing of the king’s head as a severing of tradition in the history of humanity, and finally the original sin of human beings, forgetful of their dept to the Other and of their submission to the heterogeneous powers of the sensible.

We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists. · 07.08.28, 15:14

Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p 71

“We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate the division between those who know and those who don’t, between those who possess or don’t possess the property of intelligence. It would only know minds in action: people who do, who speak about what they are doing, and who thus transform all their works into ways of demonstrating the humanity that is in them as in everyone. Such people would know that no one is born with more intelligence than his neighbor, that the superiority that someone might manifest is only the gruit of as tenacious an application to working with words as another might show to working with tools; that the inferiority of someone else is the consequence of circumstances that didn’t compel him to seek harder. In short, they would know that the perfection someone directs toward his own art is no more than the particular application of the power common to all reasonable beings, the one that each person feels when he withdraws into that privacy of consciousness where lying makes no sense. They would know that man’s dignity is independent of his position, that “man is not born to a particular position, but is meant to be happy in himself, independent of what fate brings,” (26) and that the reflection of feeling that shines in the eyes of a wife, a son, or a dear friend represents to the gaze of a sensitive enough sould adequate satisfaction.

“Such people would not be occupied creating phalansteries where vocations would correspond to passions, communities of equals, economic organizations harmoniously distributing functions and resources. To unite humankind, there is no better link than this identical intelligence in everyone.”

(26) J. Jacotot, Langue Maternelle, p. 243

All the messy personal contingencies are hidden. · 07.08.20, 12:13

Benjamin Geer, “Personal Life, Impersonal Writing (was: The Banality of Blogging)” thread, nettime list, 8.16.07

Since I’ve been getting to know more and more people who are doing academic research lately, one thing that’s really struck me has been the gulf between the smooth, impersonal, omniscient voice of the academic text, and the messy, contingent, fortuitous, emotionally-laden personal experience that went into producing the same text. In reality, personal finances, family history, friendships, romantic attachments (which might lead you to learn a language, spend time in a certain place, etc.), psychological factors (like how boring it might or might not be to obtain certain information), unruly cognitive dependencies (like how much proficiency you really have in that language) and all sorts of accidents (like whether a certain archive turns out to be closed during the time when you’re able to visit it, or whether a certain volume is missing) change the direction of people’s research, lead people to use certain sources rather than others, and so on. Yet the academic text is written as if it were the inevitable result of encyclopaedic knowledge, and of choices that depended only on intellectual necessity. All the messy personal contingencies are hidden. Of course, everyone knows they exist, it’s an open secret, but since everyone else is hiding them, too, you definitely don’t want to be the first one to acknowledge them, because your reputation would suffer. Reputations are based on how well you can maintain the illusion.

"Democracy" itself .. appears to have been coined as something of a slur by its opponents: it literally means "force" or even "violence" of the peopl · 07.08.15, 14:11

David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, pp 60-105

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class

Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Art

Counterpower is first and foremost rooted in the imagination; it emerges from the fact that all social systems are a tangle of contradictions · 07.08.12, 13:10

David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, pp 1-60

Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Posessions, pp. 50-57.

Ulrich Bachmann, Farben Zsischen Licht and Dunkelheit

All sorts of things can be deduced from art works, they're even made for this: to tolerate all kinds of interpretations without every being reduced to one. · 07.08.02, 10:08

Jonathan Monk, Frédéric Paul, ed. pp. 1-5

Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Posessions, pp. 5-11

the "primitive" bricoleur continually refabricating different versions of the same thing · 07.08.01, 13:07

Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Posessions, pp.1-8

Silja Bilz, Type One

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

An experiment that will abolish the use of words · 07.07.31, 13:05

“There is a brief episode in Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver visits the academy of Lagado and learns of an experiment that will abolish the use of words. The Lagado professors that since words are only names for things, people should carry with them those things necessary to engage in discourse with others. Gulliver describes two men, sinking under the weight of their sacks of things, who meet in the street. Opening their packs they ‘hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take thier leave’ (Swift 1762/1970:158)” Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, p 159.

Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, p 159 -171.

Just as a man gains renown through the circulation of his name with particular shells, so too, as the shells continue to move from one partner to another, they likewise gain value from their association with particular men. · 07.07.28, 11:28

Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, pp 139-157.

First and foremost, then, all play is voluntary activity · 07.07.27, 14:18

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p,7

Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, pp 88-104

Claire Bishop, Installation Art, pp 96-116

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pp 4-11
“First and foremost, then, all play is voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be a forcible imitation of it. By this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of the natural process. It is something added thereto and spread out over it like a flowering, an ornament, a garment. ” p. 7

“Play is superfluous. The need of it is only urgent to the extent that the enjoyment of it makes it a need. Play can be deferred or suspended at any time. It is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. It is never a task. It is done at leisure, during “free time.” Only when play is a recognized cultural function—a rite, a ceremony—is it bound up with notions of obligation and duty. Here we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom.” p. 8

“This “only pretending” quality of play betrays a consciousness of the inferiority of play compared with “seriousness,” a feeling that seems to be something as primary as play itself. Nevertheless, as we have already pointed out, the consciousness of play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes that troublesome “only” feeling. Any game can at any time wholly run away with the players. The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath.” p. 8

“The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a “spoil sport.” The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion—a pregnant word which means literally “in play” (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out because he threatens the existence of the play community.” p. 11

“In the world of high seriousness too, the cheat and the hypocrite have always had an easier time of it than the spoil-sports, here called apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc. It sometimes happens, however, that the spoil-sports in their turn make a new community with rules of its, own. The outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings.”

Only the most beautiful red-dyed skirts are given away as wealth · 07.07.27, 11:14

Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, pp 104-138

“Even though bundles have no utilitarian value, extensive labor is invested in their production, creating out of a plain banana leaf a specialized object with unique material properties. This detailed labor gives exchange value to each bundle.” Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, p 138

The beauty and power of yams now express desire, intention and political seduction · 07.07.26, 12:12

Annette B. Weiner, The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, pp 88-104

The great archetypal activities of human society are permeated with play from the start · 07.07.25, 13:10

Claire Bishop, Installation Art, pp 80-94

Niklas Luhman, Art as a Social System, p 244
“One of the incalculable effects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy was to raise the question of whether a concept of art can be defined. If the notion of play defies definition, then art should remain undefined as well. This view was widely held in the 1960s. It denies only the possibility for a defenition that corresponds the to “essence” of art and holds unequivocally for all observers but instead leaves the decision of what counts as art to the art system itself.” p 244

Vito Acconci, Language to Cover a Page

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pp 1-4
“The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start. Take language for instance—that first and supreme instrument which man shapes in order to communicate, to teach, to command. Language allows him to distinguish, to establish, to state things; in short, to name them and by naming them to raise them into the domain of the spirit. In the making of speech and language the spirit is contiunally “sparking” between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every mataphor is a play on words. This in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.” p. 4

Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play

Marfa · 07.07.24, 14:49