Finite and Infinite Games Book Review
This book rates among my top 10 of all times.
Reading and understanding this book will make you smarter for the rest of your life. If you don’t understand, it will make you ‘appear’ smarter. Either way, this book is a MUST READ.
Author’s purpose is to make us aware of ways to live your life. The books is a meditation on life as a contest of games and on what lies beyond winning and losing.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
Written in an aphoristic style, this book forces your brain to think. Stay awake and focus on every word as the author brilliantly uses the ‘unity of opposites’ to make a lot of his points. It is not an easy read.
The book fundamentally challenges our assumptions of how this world works, its people, the roles they play and the relationship between all. It enriches the framework used to understand life.
Every day of our life we spend in competition and comparison – between us and others, between our past and others’ past, our present and others’ present. The end result of competition is always that someone wins and others lose. Winners or losers, end up playing this game forever as one game is replaced by another and then still other. This is the finite game.
NOTE: Human beings inherently display mimetic behaviour (mimetic = imitation). Our whole life, learning, culture and conflict are driven by this mimetic desire – to achieve or obtain what others have – creating a rivalry that is destructive. We evolved religion and culture with rituals, prohibitions, sacrifices and scapegoats as a way to prevent and resolve mimetic conflicts. Rene Girard outlines his mimetic theory in the book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World but that’s for another day.
Another way to lead our life is to focus on living and not on competition. To play a game for the sake of playing and not winning. The aim is to to enjoy the journey of life and ensure this game of life continues across generations. This is the infinite game.
The author provides a framework to understand finite and infinite games, but no answers.
It is our choice to lead our life as a finite game or an infinite game. Choose wisely.
Finite and Infinite Games Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
THERE ARE at least two kinds of games.
There is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play.
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
A finite game to have a definitive ending, it must have a precise beginning.
- Finite games have temporal boundaries which all players must agree. That is, the game must be played within a marked area (space, time), and with specified players.
- The date, place, and membership of each finite game are externally defined.
- Only one person or team can win a finite game, but the other contestants may well be ranked at the conclusion of play.
In one respect, but only one, an infinite game is identical to a finite game: Infinite players can only play freely; if they must play, they cannot play.
Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care.
- Their game is not bounded by time.
- The only purpose of the infinite game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play.
- While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined.
- The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself.
- Infinite players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games they play as but moments in continuing play.
Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.
The rules will be different for each finite game.
- It is, in fact, by knowing what the rules are that we know what the game is.
- The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.
- The agreement of the players to the applicable rules is the ultimate validation of those rules.
The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play.
- The rules are changed when the players of an infinite game agree that the play is imperiled by a finite outcome—that is, by the victory of some players and the defeat of others.
- The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play.
- The rules of an infinite game are the contractual terms by which the players agree to continue playing.
The rules of an infinite game have a different status from those of a finite game.
- They are like the grammar of a living language, where those of a finite game are like the rules of debate.
- The rules, or grammar, of a living language are always evolving to guarantee the meaningfulness of discourse, while the rules of debate must remain constant.
- The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by powerful boundaries against their play – such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material resources, or the hostility of non-players, or death.
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
All the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.
Self-Veiling
There is a significant gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle. As finite players we somehow [self-]veil this freedom from ourselves.
[Pay attention to this section. It goes to the heart of the matter.].
It is in the nature of acting, Shaw said, that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia as this woman.
- Not for a second will this woman in her acting be unaware that she is acting.
- She never forgets that she has veiled herself sufficiently to play this role, that she has chosen to forget for the moment that she is this woman and not Ophelia.
- But then, neither do we as audience forget we are audience.
- Even though we see this woman as Ophelia, we are never in doubt that she is not.
- We are in complicity with her veil. We allow her performed emotions to affect us, perhaps powerfully.
- But we never forget that we allow them to do so.
The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.
Consider the actress whose skill at making Ophelia appear as this woman demonstrates the clarity with which she can distinguish the role from herself.
- Is it not possible that when she leaves the stage she does not give up acting, but simply leaves off one role for another, say the role of “actress,” an abstracted personage whose public behavior is carefully scripted and produced?
- At which point do we confront the fact that we live one life and perform another, or others, attempting to make our momentary forgetting true and lasting forgetting?
Self-veiling is a contradictory act—a free suspension of our freedom. I cannot forget that I have forgotten.
“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre).
Infinite players do not eschew the performed roles of finite play.
- On the contrary, they enter into finite games with all the appropriate energy and self-veiling, but they do so without the seriousness of finite players.
- They embrace the abstractness of finite games as abstractness, and therefore take them up not seriously, but playfully. (“Abstract” is used here according to Hegel’s familiar definition of it as the substitution of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being “concrete.”)
- For that reason infinite players regard each participant in finite play as that person playing and not as a role played by someone.
Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions.
- We are likely to be more serious with police officers when we find them uniformed and performing their mandated roles than when we find them in the process of changing into their uniforms.
- Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence.
To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.
Inasmuch as a finite game is intended for conclusion, inasmuch as its roles are scripted and performed for an audience, we shall refer to finite play as theatrical. Although script and plot do not seem to be written in advance, we are always able to look back at the path followed to victory and say of the winners that they certainly knew how to act and what to say.
Dramatically, one chooses to be a mother; theatrically, one takes on the role of mother.
The script is the record of the actual exchanges between players—whether acts or words—and therefore cannot be written down beforehand.
In all true finite play the scripts are composed in the course of play.
- During the game all finite play is dramatic, since the outcome is yet unknown.
- That the outcome is not known is what makes it a true game.
- The theatricality of finite play has to do with the fact that there is an outcome.
- Finite play is dramatic, but only provisionally dramatic.
- A true Master Player plays as though the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.
- Surprise in finite play is the triumph of the past over the future. The Master Player who already knows what moves are to be made has a decisive advantage over the unprepared player who does not yet know what moves will be made.
Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised.
- If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.
- Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past.
Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there.
- With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself.
- Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.
Because finite players are trained to prevent the future from altering the past, they must hide their future moves.
- Finite players must appear to be something other than what they are.
- Everything about their appearance must be concealing.
- To appear is not to appear.
- All the moves of a finite player must be deceptive: feints, distractions, falsifications, misdirections, mystifications.
Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness.
- It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability.
- It is not a matter of exposing one’s unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.
- The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past.
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained.
- To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there.
- Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished.
- Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.
- Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.
A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game.
- Titles are public.
- They are for others to notice.
What one wins in a finite game is a title.
- The effectiveness of a title depends on its visibility, its noticeability to others.
- It is a principal function of society to validate titles and to assure their perpetual recognition.
Death in life is a mode of existence in which one has ceased all play; there is no further striving for titles.
What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles.
“He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jesus).
If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive.
- They are competing for life.
- Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play.
- Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing.
- Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived.
- “Life itself appears only as a means to life” – Marx.
Death, for finite players, is abstract, not concrete.
- It is not the whole person, but only an abstracted fragment of the whole, that dies in life or lives in death.
- Immortality is the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.
Infinite players die.
- Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play.
- The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play.
- For that reason infinite players do not play for their own life; they live for their own play.
Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal.
- In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability.
- To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.
The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous.
Infinite play is inherently paradoxical, just as finite play is inherently contradictory.
- Because it is the purpose of infinite players to continue the play, they do not play for themselves.
- The contradiction of finite play is that the players desire to bring play to an end for themselves.
- The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others.
- The paradox is precisely that they play only when others go on with the game.
Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play.
- It is for this reason they play as mortals.
- The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.
If finite players acquire titles from winning their games, we must say of infinite players that they have nothing but their names. Names, like titles, are given.
- When a person is known by title, the attention is on a completed past, on a game already concluded, and not therefore to be played again. A title effectively takes a person out of play.
- Titles are given at the end of play, names at the beginning.
- When a person is known only by name, the attention of others is on an open future. We simply cannot know what to expect. Whenever we address each other by name we ignore all scripts, and open the possibility that our relationship will become deeply reciprocal.
Titles are abstractions; names are always concrete.
Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past.
The titled are powerful.
- Those around them are expected to yield, to withdraw their opposition, and to conform to their will—in the arena in which the title was won.
- The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition. Whichever element can move another is the more powerful.
- The exercise of power also presupposes a closed field and finite units of time. My power is determined by the amount of resistance I can displace within given spatial and temporal limits.
- Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others?
Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play.
- But power is not properly measurable until the game is completed.
- To speak meaningfully of a person’s power is to speak of what that person has already completed in one or another closed field.
- To see power is to look backward in time.
- One does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful.
Power is never one’s own, and in that respect it shows the contradiction inherent in all finite play.
- I can be powerful only by not playing, by showing that the game is over.
- I can therefore have only what powers others give me.
- Power is bestowed by an audience after the play is complete.
- Power is contradictory, and theatrical.
Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation.
- Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.
- Where the finite player plays to be powerful the infinite player plays with strength.
A powerful person is one who brings the past to an outcome, settling all its unresolved issues. A strong person is one who carries the past into the future, showing that none of its issues is capable of resolution.
- Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen.
- Power is finite in amount. Strength cannot be measured, because it is an opening and not a closing act.
- Power refers to the freedom persons have within limits, strength to the freedom persons have with limits.
- Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.
Strength is paradoxical.
- I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them.
- I am strong because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.
Infinite play cannot prevent or eliminate evil.
- Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.
- Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of the player.
- Unheard silence is not the loss of the player’s voice, but the loss of listeners for that voice.
- Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules.
- Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power.
Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil.
- They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction.
- They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.
Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game, but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game.
NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone.
One cannot be human by oneself. There is no self-hood where there is no community.
As in the Zen image we are not the stones over which the stream of the world flows; we are the stream itself.
Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.
It is this essential fluidity of our humanness that is irreconcilable with the seriousness of finite play.
- It is, therefore, this fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play.
- This challenge is commonly misunderstood as the need to find room for playfulness within finite games.
- This is what was referred to above as playing at, or perhaps playing around, a kind of play that has no consequence. For example: entertainment, amusement, diversion, comic relief, recreation, relaxation.
- Inevitably, however, seriousness will creep back into this kind of play. The executive’s vacation, like the football team’s time out, comes to be a device for refreshing the contestant for a higher level of competition.
- Even the open playfulness of children is exploited through organized athletic, artistic, and educational regimens as a means of preparing the young for serious adult competition.
The interest of infinite players has little in common with such politics, since they are not concerned to find how much freedom is available within the given realities—for this is freedom only in the trivial sense of playing at—but are concerned to show how freely we have decided to place these particular boundaries around our finite play.
They remind us that political realities do not precede, but follow from, the essential fluidity of our humanness.
- To have a politics is to have a set of rules by which one attempts to reach a desired end.
- To be political—in the sense meant here—is to recast rules in the attempt to eliminate all societal ends, that is, to maintain the essential fluidity of human association.
Politics is a form of theatricality. It is the performance of roles before an audience, according to a script whose last scene is known in advance by the performers.
No nation can go to war until it has found another that can agree to the terms of the conflict.
- Each side must therefore be in complicity with the other.
- Before I can have an enemy, I must persuade another to recognize me as an enemy.
Society
Society they understand as the sum of those relations that are under some form of public constraint, culture as whatever we do with each other by undirected choice.
Schools are a species of finite play to the degree that they bestow ranked awards on those who win degrees from them. Those awards in turn qualify graduates for competition in still higher games—certain prestigious colleges, for example, and then certain professional schools beyond that.
A society preserves its memory of past winners.
- Its record-keeping functions are crucial to societal order.
- Large bureaucracies grow out of the need to verify the numerous entitlements of the citizens of that society.
The power of a society is determined by its victory over other societies in still larger finite games.
- Its most treasured memories are those of the heroes fallen in victorious battles with other societies.
- Heroes of lost battles are almost never memorialized.
The prizes won by its citizens can be protected only if the society as a whole remains powerful in relation to other societies.
- Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole.
- It is in the interest of a society therefore to encourage competition within itself, to establish the largest possible number of prizes, for the holders of prizes will be those most likely to defend the society as a whole against its competitors.
Deviation is antisocietal and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions.
- It is easy to see why deviancy is to be resisted.
- If persons did not adhere to the standing rules of the society, any number of rules would change, and some would be dropped altogether.
- This would mean that past winners no longer warrant ceremonial recognition of their titles and are therefore without power—like Russian princes after the Revolution.
- Procedures as academic accreditation, licensure of trades and professions, synodical ordination, parliamentary confirmation of official appointments, and the inauguration of political leaders are acts of the larger society allowing persons to compete in the finite games within it.
Power attaches to titles inasmuch as those who acknowledge them accept the fact that the struggle in which the titles were won cannot be taken up again. Possession of the title signifies an agreement that competition is forever closed in that particular game.
Property
The purpose of property is to make our titles visible.
- Property may be stolen, but the thief does not therefore own it. Ownership can never be stolen.
- There is no effective pattern of entitlement in a society short of the free agreement of all opponents that the titles to property are in the hands of the actual winners.
One does not win by power; one wins to be powerful. The law is powerful for persons only because they obey it.
Property must be seen as compensation. Property must be seen to be consumed.
- Whoever is unable to show a correspondence between wealth and the risks undergone to acquire it, or the talents spent in its acquisition, will soon face a challenge over entitlement.
- Property is an attempt to recover the past.
- We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything.
Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability; and conversely, since application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in the community
– Veblen
Compensation makes itself conspicuous by taking up space. Consumption draws attention to itself by the length of time it continues.
It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.
- If property is to be protected less by power as such than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists—what Plato called poietai: the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever.
- The more effective policy for a society is to find ways of persuading its thieves to abandon their role as competitors for property for the sake of becoming audience to the theater of wealth.
Societies fall back on the skill of those poietai who can theatricalize the property relations, and indeed, all the inner structures of each society.
- Societal theorists of any subtlety whatever know that such theatricalization must be taken with great seriousness.
- Without it there is no culture at all, and a society without culture would be too drab and lifeless to be endured.
- The rigid authoritarian shell of Plato’s Republic will be “filled with a multitude of things which are no longer necessities, as for example all kinds of hunters and artists, many of them concerned with shapes and colors, many with music; poets and their auxiliaries, actors, choral dancers, and contractors; and makers of all kinds of instruments, including those needed for the beautification of women.”
If wealth and might are to be performed, great wealth and great might must be performed brilliantly.
Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture.
- Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai.
- Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society’s heroes.
- Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph.
Art
Another successful defense of society against the culture within itself is to give artists a place by regarding them as the producers of property, thus elevating the value of consuming art, or owning it.
- Museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.
- Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.
Inventors, makers, artists, storytellers, mythologists are not makers of actualities, but makers of possibilities.
“Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects”.
– Rank
Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders.
- Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art.
- Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art.
- If art cannot become property, property is never art.
We are not artists by reason of having mastered certain skills or exercising specified techniques.
- Art has no scripted roles for its performers. It is precisely because it has none that it is art.
- Artistry can be found anywhere; indeed, it can only be found anywhere.
- One must be surprised by it. It cannot be looked for.
- We do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.
Artists cannot be trained.
- Poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously.
- They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.
A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition.
Patriotism
Patriotism—that is, the desire to protect the power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society—is inherently belligerent.
- Since there can be no prizes without a society, no society without opponents, patriots must create enemies before we can require protection from them.
- The spirit of patriotism is therefore characteristically associated with the military or other modes of international conflict.
A horizon is a phenomenon of vision.
- One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see.
- There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision. The horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself.
- What limits vision is rather the incompleteness of that vision.
To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon.
- Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon.
- Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary.
- Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities.
Any culture that continues to influence our vision continues to grow in the very exercise of that influence.
Each new speaker of its language both learns the language and alters it.
A culture is sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas, its works, even its language.
- This is a common strategy of a society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries.
- But it is a strategy certain to fail, because it confuses the creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that activity.
- Societies characteristically separate the ideas from their thinkers, the poiema from its poietes.
- A society abstracts its thought and grants power to certain ideas as though they had an existence of their own independent from those who think them, even those who first produced them.
One cannot be free by opposing another. My freedom does not depend on your loss of freedom.
For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society, enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely.
- If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries.
- To keep its definitions clear a state must stimulate danger to itself.
- Under the constant danger of war the people of a state are far more attentive and obedient to the finite structures of their society.
- “Just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace” – Hegel.
War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.
- Finite players go to war against states because they endanger boundaries.
- Infinite players oppose states because they engender boundaries.
- The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it.
- Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies.
“Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object” – Rousseau.
- Winning a war can be as destructive as losing one, for if boundaries lose their clarity, as they do in a decisive victory, the state loses its identity.
- A war fought to end all wars, in the strategy of finite play, only breeds universal warfare.
What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.
Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guardians.
- True poets lead no one unawares.
- It is nothing other than awareness that poets—that is, creators of all sorts—seek.
- They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.
- Poetry is the making (poiesis) of the real and is concrete.
Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract.
- Whenever what is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it becomes metaphysical.
- The poiema is an object to be studied, not an act to be learned.
- One cannot learn an object, but only the poiesis, or the act of creating objects.
- To separate the poiema from poiesis, the created object from the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.
Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.
I AM THE GENIUS of myself
I AM THE GENIUS of myself, the poietes who composes the sentences I speak and the actions I take.
- It is I, not the mind, that thinks.
- It is I, not the will, that acts.
- It is I, not the nervous system, that feels.
To be the genius of my speech is to be the origin of my words, to say them for the first, and last, time.
- Even to repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another person in another time and place.
- When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not.
- I address you as audience, and do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.
Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the paradox of infinite play.
- You can have what you have only by releasing it to others.
- The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all.
- Spoken to me, your words become mine to do with as I please.
- As the genius of your words, you lose all authority over them. So too with thoughts.
The words die with the sound.
To look at something is to look at it within its limitations.
- I look at what is marked off, at what stands apart from other things.
- But things do not have their own limitations.
- “Nature has no outline. Imagination has” – Blake.
Not allowing the past to be past may be the primary source for the seriousness of finite players.
- The finite player must not only have an audience but must have an audience to convince.
- Just as the titles of winners are worthless unless they are visible to others, there is a kind of anti-title that attaches to invisibility.
- To the degree that we are invisible we have a past that has condemned us to oblivion.
Unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win.
- By proving to the audience they were wrong, we prove to ourselves the audience was right.
- The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers.
- Winners, especially celebrated winners, must prove repeatedly they are winners.
- The script must be played over and over again. Titles must be defended by new contests.
- The visibility of our victories only tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.
Whenever we act as the genius of ourselves, it will be in the spirit of allowing the past to be past.
In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never is a child moved to genius.
Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play.
- You move me by pressing me from without toward a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared.
- It is a staged action that succeeds only if in moving me you remain unmoved yourself.
- I can be moved to tears by skilled performances and heart-rending newspaper accounts, or moved to passion by political manifestos and narratives of heroic achievement—but in each case I am moved according to a formula or design to which the actor or agent is immune.
- We can be moved only by persons who are not what they are.
- We can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be.
If to be touched is to respond from one’s center, it is also to respond as a whole person.
- To be whole is to be hale, or healthy. Whoever is touched is healed.
- The finite player’s interest is not in being healed, or made whole, but in being cured, or made functional.
- Healing restores me to play, curing restores me to competition in one or another game.
Physicians who cure must abstract persons into functions. They treat the illness, not the person.
- What sustains the enormous size and cost of the curing professions is the widespread desire to see oneself as a function, or a collection of functions.
- To be ill is to be dysfunctional; to be dysfunctional is to be unable to compete in one’s preferred contests.
Sexuality for the infinite player is entirely a matter of touch.
- One cannot touch without touching sexually.
- Sexuality is a drama of origins, it gives full expression to the genius you are and to the genius of others who participate in that drama.
- Genuine sexual expression is at least as dangerous to society as genuine artistic expression.
The sexual metaphysician can appeal to at least two powerful solutions – one is to treat sexuality as a process of reproduction; another is to place it in the area of feeling and behavior.
Like every other natural process it is a phenomenon of causal continuity, having no inherent beginning or end.
- Therefore we cannot be said to initiate the process by any act of our own.
- We can only be carried along by it, inasmuch as conception occurs only when all the necessary conditions have been met by the parenting couple.
- No one conceives a child; a child is conceived in the conjunction of sperm and ovum.
- The mother does not give birth to a child; the mother is where the birth occurs.
- Metaphysically understood, sexuality has nothing to do with our existence as persons, for it views persons as expressions of sexuality, and not sexuality as the expression of persons.
Second way of veiling genuine sexuality is to regard it as a feeling or as a kind of behavior.
- In either case it has the character of something under observation.
- Even if it is our own sexuality we are concerned with, we can still look on it from without, making an assessment of it as though it were of another person.
Sexuality can in this way be dealt with as a societal phenomenon, regulated and managed according to the prevailing ideology.
- A Master Player of finite sexuality chooses not to take these attitudes as a way of refusing the sexual game, but takes them to be part of the game.
- Thus my indifference or revulsion to your sexuality becomes in your masterful play a sexual indifference, a sexual revulsion.
- This is the plot of the classical pulp novel and of Hollywood romance: indifferent girl won by ardent boy.
What one wants in the sexual contest is not just to have defeated the other, but to have the defeated other.
- Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent.
- Sexual titles, like all other titles, have appropriately conspicuous emblems.
- Only in sexuality do persons themselves become property.
- The seduced opponent is so displayed as to draw public attention to the seducer’s triumph.
- In the complex plotting of sexual encounter it is by no means uncommon for the partners to have played a double game in which each is winner and loser, and each is an emblem for the other’s seductive power.
- In sexuality persons are abstracted from themselves.
A society shows its mastery in the management of sexuality not when it sets out unambiguous standards for sexual behavior or prescribed attitudes toward sexual feelings, but when it institutionalizes the emblematic display of sexual conquest.
- These institutions can be as varied as burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands or requiring the high visibility of a spouse at an elected official’s inauguration.
- Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other.
Finite sexuality shapes society than is shaped by it.
- Only to a limited extent do we take on the sexual roles assigned us by society.
- Much more frequently we enter into societal arrangements by way of sexual roles.
- Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the loser.
- The most desirable form of property is the publicly acknowledged possession of another’s person, a relationship to which the possessed must of course freely consent.
The most serious struggles are those for sexual property.
The appetite for novelty in lovemaking—new positions, the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners—is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection.
Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries.
- They are concerned not with power but with vision.
- There is nothing hidden in infinite sexuality.
- Sexual desire is exposed as sexual desire and is never therefore serious.
- Its satisfaction is never an achievement, but an act in a continuing relationship, and therefore joyous.
- Its lack of satisfaction is never a failure, but only a matter to be taken on into further play.
Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body.
- Infinite lovers have no “private parts.”
- They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accessible to others for special favors.
- It is not their bodies but their persons they make accessible to others.
In finite sexuality I expect to relate to you as a body; in infinite sexuality I expect to relate to you in your body.
Families can convene only out of choice.
A FINITE GAME OCCURS within a world
World exists in the form of audience.
- An audience consists of persons observing a contest without participating in it.
- An audience does not receive its identity according to the persons within it, but according to the events it observes.
- Those who remember that day remember precisely what they were doing in the early afternoon of that day, not because it was the 22d of November, but because it was at that moment that they became audience to the events of that day.
The fact that a finite game needs an audience before which it can be played, and the fact that an audience needs to be singularly absorbed in the events before it, show the crucial reciprocity of finite play and the world.
- Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves.
- Simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world.
No world lasts forever.
There is an indefinite number of worlds.
I cannot be a finite player without being divided against myself.
- When sufficiently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players.
- It is they, quite as much as the players, who win or lose.
We cannot become a world without being divided against ourselves.
- A finite game does not have its own time. It exists in a world’s time.
- An audience allows players only so much time to win their titles.
- Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop future strategies.
- Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed.
- As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous.
We look on childhood and youth as those “times of life” rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have time to be free.
- Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die.
- Time divided into periods is theatrical time. The lapse of time between the opening and closing of an era is a scene between curtains.
- The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen.
The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it.
- As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another.
- There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player’s temporality.
- Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is the beginning.
- An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time.
- Work is not an infinite player’s way of passing time, but of engendering possibility.
For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free.
For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time.
A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.
Infinite players can play any number of finite games, so too can they join the audience of any game.
- They do so, however, for the play that is in observing, quite aware that they are audience.
- They look, but they see that they are looking.
Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer.
- If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers.
- They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry.
- Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.
Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema of it.
NATURE IS the realm of the unspeakable
We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.
- The Master Player in us tolerates this indifference scarcely at all.
- Indeed, we respond to it as a challenge, an invitation to confrontation and struggle.
- If nature will offer us no home, offer us nothing at all, we will then clear and arrange a space for ourselves.
- We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization.
- We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of technology that allows us to master nature’s vagaries.
Like any Master Player we have been patiently attentive to the slightest clues in our opponent’s behavior—as a way of preparing ourselves against surprise.
“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” – Bacon
The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to human understanding.
- What we have done by showing that certain events repeat themselves according to known laws, is to explain them.
- Explanation is the mode of discourse in which we show why matters must be as they are.
- All laws made use of in explanation look backward in time from the conclusion or the completion of the sequence.
It is implicit in all explanatory discourse that just as there is a discoverable necessity in the outcome of past events, there is a discoverable necessity in future events.
- What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows the initial event and the laws covering their succession.
- A prediction is but an explanation in advance.
The grandest discovery of the human genius is the perfect compatibility between the structure of the natural order and the structure of the mind, thereby making a complete understanding of nature possible.
“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” – Einstein
Nature does have a voice, and its voice is no different from our own.
- We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.
- Our great skill lies in finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of accident and chance.
There is an irony in our silencing of the gods.
- By presuming to speak for the unspeakable, by hearing our own voice as the voice of nature, we have had to step outside the circle of nature.
- It is one thing for physics and chemistry to be speaking about nature; it is quite another thing for physics and chemistry to be speaking of nature.
- No chemist would want to say that chemistry is itself chemical, for our speaking cannot be both chemical and about chemistry.
If speaking about a process is itself part of the process, there is something that must remain permanently hidden from the speaker.
To be intelligible at all, we must claim that we can step aside from the process and comment on it “objectively” and “dispassionately” without anything obstructing our view of these matters.
By way of this perfectly reasonable claim gods have stolen back into our struggle with nature. By depriving gods of their voices, the gods have taken ours.
Nature allows no master over itself. If we must obey to command, then our commanding is only obeying and not commanding.
- The ignorance we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of nature has swept us back into itself.
- What we thought we read in nature we discover that we have read into nature.
- “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” – Heisenberg
We are speaking now of no ordinary ignorance. It is not what we could have known but do not; it is unintelligibility itself: that which no mind can ever comprehend.
Metaphor is the joining of like to unlike such that one can never become the other.
At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word “falcon.”
The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.
- Our attempt to take control of nature, to be Master Player in our opposition to it, is an attempt to rid ourselves of language.
- It is the refusal to accept nature as nature. It is to deafen ourselves to metaphor, and to make nature into something to so familiar it is essentially an extension of our willing and speaking.
- What the hunter kills is not the deer, but the metaphor of the deer – the “deer.” Killing the deer is not an act against nature; it is an act against language.
To kill is to impose a silence that remains a silence.
- It is the reduction of an unpredictable vitality to a predictable mass, the transformation of the remote into the familiar.
The physicists who look at their objects within their limitations teach physics; those who see the limitations they place around their objects teach “physics.” For them physics is a poiesis.
If nature is the realm of the unspeakable, history is the realm of the speakable.
- No speaking is possible that is not itself historical.
- Students of history, like students of nature, often believe they can find unbiased, direct view of events.
- No one can look in on an age, even if it is one’s own age, without looking out of an age as well. There is no refuge outside history for such viewers, any more than there is a vantage outside nature.
Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise tempts us into designing boundaries for it, searching through it for patterns of repetition.
- They must dehistoricize themselves, taking a perspective from the timeless, believing that each observed history is always of others and never of themselves, that each observation is of history but not itself historical.
- Genuine historians therefore reverse the assumption of the observers of nature that the observation itself cannot be an act of nature.
- Historians who understand themselves to be historical abandon explanation altogether. The mode of discourse appropriate for such self-aware history is narrative.
In a genuine story there is no law that makes any act necessary.
- Explanations place all apparent possibilities into the context of the necessary.
- Stories set all necessities into the context of the possible.
- Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot comprehend freedom at all.
- We explain nothing when we say that persons do whatever they do because they choose to do it.
- We have not told a story when we show that persons do whatever they do because they were caused to do it—by their genes, their social circumstances of the influence of gods.
Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must, but as they do.
Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink we thought we knew.
If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.
Successful explanations do not draw attention to themselves as modes of speaking, because what is explained is not itself subject to history.
- I can explain nothing to you unless I first draw your attention to patent inadequacies in your knowledge: discontinuities in the relations between objects, or the presence of anomalies you cannot account for by any of the laws known to you.
- You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.
Major challenges, however, are too serious to be met with argument, or with sharpened explanation.
- They call either for outright and wholesale rejection, or for conversion.
- True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startling new ways.
Radical conversions, especially, veil themselves against their own arbitrariness.
- Augustine, the most famous convert of antiquity, was puzzled that he could have held so firmly to so many different falsehoods; he was not astounded that there are so many different truths.
- His conversion was not from explanation to narrative, but from one explanation to another.
- When he crossed the line from paganism to Christianity, he arrived in the territory of a truth beyond further challenge.
Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their errors. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent.
Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim to true knowledge.
- Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement.
- Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to.
- In those areas appropriate to the contests now concluded, winners possess a knowledge that no longer can be challenged.
Knowledge, therefore, is like property.
- It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it.
- It must stand in their way.
- It must be emblematic pointing backwards at the possessor’s competitive skills.
So close are knowledge and property that they are often thought to be continuous.
- Those who are entitled to knowledge feel they should be granted property as well.
- Those who are entitled to property believe a certain knowledge goes with it.
- Scholars demand higher salaries for their publishable successes; industrialists sit on university boards.
If explanation, to be successful, must be oblivious to the silence of nature, it must also in its success impose silence of its listeners. Imposed silence is the first consequence of a Master Player’s triumph.
What one wins in a title is the privilege of magisterial speech.
- The privilege of magisterial speech is the highest honor attaching to any title.
- We expect the first act of a winner to be a speech.
- The first act of the loser may also be a speech, but it will be a speech to concede victory, to declare there will be no further challenge to the winner.
- It is a speech that promises to silence the loser’s voice.
Last two chapters of the book will be updated shortly.
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