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| Ilynx |
Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around (Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play").The Spring 2011 graduate seminar is titled "Game Gift Strategy Economy." The ordinating term for this set is play. The seminar picks up where Routine left off, continuing the project of inventing a concept capable of supporting theory in electracy, specifically adequate to the challenge of EmerAgency consulting, flash reason against the Internet Accident. Unpacking the seminar title gives Game Theory as Contrast, in favor of Fatal Strategy (Baudrillard), approaching policy issues as expressing the drive not of Agon (competition, as in von Neumann's theory) but Ilynx (vertigo, Caillois). Fatal Strategy is projected from French speculations on Gift Economy (symbolic exchange, expenditure), developed not from considerations of work or production but play, festival. This context is the one underlying the spirit of Montmartre, the invention of the avant-garde in nineteenth-century Paris, providing the logic for an image metaphysics emerging within Entertainment, the institutional site of electracy.
The most important aspect of play to keep in mind in this context is that, like technics (Bernard Stiegler), it is prior to and productive of "humanity." Animals playing with tools became human. Game as drive (Caillois) express this counterforce of play that has been neglected by those characterizing technics as an autonomous ontology (interdependent with cultural evolution), such that in industrialized conditions machine expropriates decision. It may be the case that machines have exceeded human calculation, but certainly not the faculty of play. In "Routine" we used joke as the simple form to explore this faculty, developed in the CATT's tale as stand-up routine. Now we extend joke into 'Pataphysics as the vehicle of diversion, to access again whatever fun entails. As Derrida noted, Levi-Strauss followed Rousseau in "conceiving of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe, a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a brushing aside of nature." Catastrophe today is the frontier of partnership, of desiring machine that is apparatus. Such is the point of departure for the experiment in electrate consulting in progress here.
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