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Can we think ‘life’ under the rubric of ‘play’and the playing of ‘games’? What is thereabout play that allows it to function as a heuris-tically fertile model for conceptualizing theground lines of an optimal human existence?And what types of play best exemplifies sucha culmination both as norm and as goal? Tworemarkable and radically unconventionalphilosophical works, Bernard Suits’s Thegrasshopper: games, life and utopia (1978)and James Carse’s Finite and infinite games:a vision of life as play and possibility (1986)attempt to provide essential conceptual toolsfor answering these questions. For Suits, work-ing at the beginning in a definitional mode,play is first and foremost to be contrasted withnon-play, or work, and then examined as to its‘utopian’ potential and its ability to functionas the ‘ideal of existence’ (1978: 166). Thisapproach mirrors that developed, within anadmittedly different framework, by JosefPieper in his enduring Leisure, the basis ofculture (1948), with which it has deep, but cer-tainly not intended, affinities. Suits’s book is,like Pieper’s, meant to reestablish, in a novelformat and with novel means, the ‘classical’doctrine represented in the Aristotelian tradi-tion which distinguished instrumental activi-ties from activities that are ends in themselves.His book is meant to uncover a kind of ‘grass-hopper logic’ that will reveal the formal framesof games and game playing and their bearingon the central problem of philosophy: how weare to live our lives.

Carse’s dense, rich, and allusive conceptualscheme intersects with, expands, and in cru-

cial ways reconfigures Suits’s bitingly provo-cative analysis of the philosophical logic ofplay and games. But Carse, unlike Suits’s de-liberately anti-Wittgensteinian procedure,makes no effort to arrive at a definition ofgames. For him the scope or conceptual spaceof games encompasses all of human existence.Play becomes a generative metaphor or modelthat is meant to uncover a network of relation-ships that otherwise would be overlooked. Thedynamic opposition of finite and infinite gamesfunctions as a kind of analytical engine thatgenerates a whole series of dialectically rela-ted oppositions that show how a reflection onplay can cast a powerful light on such centralhuman themes as power and property, the na-ture of the political, the basis of the distinc-tion between society and culture, culture aspoiesis not poiema, sexuality, the generativeand essentially metaphorical nature of langu-age, and the import of a technological or ‘ma-chine’ mediated relation to nature. The playconcept is clearly extended, albeit schemati-cally, to all of life. Carse’s deep and evocativeargument and its aphoristic style and at timesparadoxical formulations engender a sequenceof exploding insights and envisaged applica-tions and extensions in the mind of the reader,who is constantly caught up short and broughtto a halt. While one reads Suits with a smileon one’s face, one reads Carse with gapingmouth. His book is a kind of explicitly existen-tial version of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or amodern evocation of the playful space of theTao te Ching.1

Philosophy and the play of life

Robert E. Innis

2

Grasshopper logic

Suits’s arch, absorbing, and perplexing rumi-nation on ‘games, life and utopia’ takes offfrom the central claim that “Utopian existenceis fundamentally concerned with game-play-ing” (1978: ix), exemplified in the “model ofimprovidence” of Aesop’s Grasshopper, inwhose figure we can see delineated the out-lines of “the life most worth living” (1978:ix). As Suits sees it, the Grasshopper is both a“working Utopian whose time has not yetcome” and a “speculative Utopian” who candefend the ideal even in the face of the inevi-table and clearly predictable death that liesbefore him. Suits’s procedure is to construct,by means of a peculiar fusion of dramatic andargumentative devices, a philosophical defi-nition of or theory of games and “to followthe implications of that discovery even whenthey lead in surprising, and sometimes discon-certing, directions” (1978: ix). “The wholeburden of my teaching”, says the Grasshop-per, “is that you ought to be idle” (1978: 7).There is a peculiar (Aristotelian) ‘logic’ to theGrasshopper’s position: “work is not self-jus-tifying” (1978: 8). We work because we can-not play all the time, which the Grasshopperconsiders a purely contingent fact. Absent thatconstraint, everyone alive would be self-con-sciously what they “really” (1978: 9) are,Grasshoppers. The Grasshopper reports hav-ing a recurrent dream in which is revealed,though just how remains uncertain, that

“everyone alive is in fact engaged in playingelaborate games, while at the same time belie-ving themselves to be going about their ordina-ry affairs. Carpenters, believing themselves tobe merely pursuing their trade, are really play-ing a game, and similarly with politicians, phi-losophers, lovers, murderers, thieves, and saints.Whatever occupation or activity you can thinkof, it is in reality a game” (1978: 10).

The dream turns into a nightmare, however,when the Grasshopper in the dream realizes

that when he converts anyone to his position -that they are really playing games - the audi-tor simply ceases to exist. “It is as though hehad never been” (1978: 10). The Grasshop-per has “converted everyone to oblivion” andfinds himself standing alone “beneath the sum-mer stars in absolute despair” (1978: 10).Upon awakening to find the world still “teem-ing with sentient beings after all” the Grass-hopper finds the carpenter and the philoso-pher “going about their work as before” (1978:10). But he is immediately besieged withdoubt. What if they are really making movesin some ‘ancient game’ whose rules they haveforgotten? Having conveyed this doubt to hisdisciples, Prudence and Scepticus, the Grass-hopper, sensing of the chill of death climbingup his legs, bids his friends farewell.

The rhetorical form of Suits’s dialogue-likeargument, which itself follows the logic of agame, cannot be replicated here. But when ‘thedisciples’, Scepticus and Prudence, reflectupon what the dying Grasshopper has re-counted to them, they find themselves caughtin a “tangle of riddles”. Play is defined as “do-ing things we value for their own sake” (1978:15). Work is defined as “doing things we valuefor the sake of something else” (1978: 15).Play, on this account, would encompass suchthings as “vacationing in Florida, collectingstamps, reading a novel, playing chess, or play-ing the trombone” (1978: 15). If, however,play is the equivalent of ‘leisure activities’ theplaying of games would be just one kind ofleisure activity. ‘Playing’ and ‘playing games’would not be the same. As the disciples faceup to Grasshopper logic, they become awarethat the Grasshopper’s point was that not justplaying, but game playing is the essential markof the life of a Grasshopper. The quintessen-tial Grasshopper knows that he is essentiallya player of games, and, true to his logic, heperishes, just as all do who come to the samerealization. What is the connection betweenthe death of the Grasshopper, who knows heis a Grasshopper and that the acme of his ex-istence consists in playing games, and the

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death of all those who really are Grasshop-pers, but do not know it? Do they perish be-cause of the attainment of knowledge? Can itbe that the knowledge that is essential to lifeentails our very death? Can such momentousconsequences flow from the search for a defi-nition of game playing?

The heart of Suits’s book is the progressiveconstruction, development, and defence of adefinition of games. Let us turn directly to it.

“To play a game is to attempt to achieve a spe-cific state of affairs [prelusory goal], usingonly means permitted by rules [lusory means],where the rules prohibit use of more efficientin favour of less efficient means [constitutiverules], and where the rules are accepted justbecause they make possible such activity [lu-sory attitude] (...) playing a game is the volun-tary attempt to overcome unnecessary obsta-cles” (1978: 41).2

The characterization of the four factors in thedefinition - goal, means, rules, lusory attitude- entail, at least at first glance, that games are“essentially different from the ordinary activi-ties of life” (1978: 41), including, it would ap-pear, ‘merely playing’. Baseball, chess, golf,bridge, monopoly, tennis are all games underthis definition, as are ‘Cowboys and Indians’,‘Cops and robbers’, and ‘House’, which aremake-believe games. Although they all differfrom one another in outer form, they have thesame logical skeleton. Each one of them is an‘institution’ that is realized or embodied in aninexhaustible number of actual games. By arigid application of these factors to any actualgame we can distinguish triflers, cheats, andspoilsports from ‘real players’. Triflers “recog-nize rules but not goals” (1978: 47). Cheats“recognize goals but not rules” (47). And whileplayers, by definition, recognize both rules andgoals, spoilsports “recognize neither rules norgoals” (47). The claims of both the game andits institution are recognized by the player,while triflers and cheats accept only institutio-nal claims. Spoilsports ultimately repudiate

both the game and the institution. You cannot‘win’ a footrace by arriving at the goal afterrunning through the infield. You cannot inducecheckmate by moving a piece straight acrossa board while your opponent is looking away.You cannot draw a winning card from a deckwhen the card lies below the card that must bedrawn next. While each of these actions wouldrealize the prelusory goal - which is indepen-dent of the game - it is clear that one has‘cheated’ - ludically lied - in order to do so.‘Trying to lose’ or ‘throwing the game’ is ob-viously a case of ‘trifling’, because the prelu-sory goal is not acknowledged or taken seri-ously. The cheat suffers from an excess of zeal,the trifler from a deficiency of zeal.

At the heart of Suits’s argument is the claimthat “games exhibit inefficiency”, that is, the“least expenditure of a limited resource neces-sary to a given goal” (54). What the resourcesare is defined within the game, such as, forexample, strokes in golf or seconds in a 100-meter race. No resources - that is, means - forreaching the goal can be imported from theoutside. You cannot claim to have climbed amountain if you have ascended by helicopteror elevator. You cannot use an electronic hom-ing device to propel a golf ball into a hole.Inefficiency, so defined, is a constitutive fea-ture of the game in the sense that it enters intothe formal frame of the game, the ‘lusoryspace’ wherein the ludic action takes place,one of Huizinga’s main themes in Homoludens. This frame is a set of ‘artificial re-straints’ that we impose upon ourselves. With-out them we could go directly to the prelusorygoal, but we could not ‘win the game’. Win-ning the game must be a consequence of play-ing the game: both are what Suits calls “’auto-telic’ aims” (1978: 78). They belong intrinsi-cally to the game itself and are defined in termsof it. Both playing and winning, as well as try-ing and achieving (which are not restricted togames), are sought as “ends in themselves”(1978: 79). Generals, for example, can equallyvalue both combat and victory, just as chessplayers can equally value both the match and

4

outcome of the match. Process and result be-come equifinal: the essence of a competitivegame (as opposed to what Suits calls the ‘stan-dard’ sexual act, which, he points out, is notsuch a game). “Failing to complete the sexualact does not imply a winner” (80) or, for thatmatter, a loser. Suits notes “it would be oddindeed if the standard sexual act turned out tobe indistinguishable from a competitive game”(1978: 81). Failure to achieve orgasm is not a‘loss’ in the way being checkmated is, whichis, in fact, an ‘achievement’.

What about games of make-believe? Is therea goal that terminates that sort of game? Atfirst thought the distinctive feature of make-believe games is that they are role-governedmuch more than goal-governed. But to be role-governed does not mean to be scripted before-hand, as in theatrical performances and cer-emonial rituals. These latter are both stagedand scripted. But in ‘Cops and robbers’ and‘Cowboys and Indians’ we have cases of playsthat are “cast but not written” (1978: 92), sincethe outcome of any particular game is not fore-seen. Furthermore, Suits continues, there is thefurther problem of just what constitutes a “suc-cessful, or even legitimate” move in such agame (1978: 92). Make-believe could be takenfor a kind of “impersonation” (1978: 94). Aplayer at “make-believe assumes a false iden-tity so that he can be playing a role”, as op-posed to a ‘serious’ impersonator who is re-ally an impostor (1978: 94). It is the dramaticskill of the impersonator that is the skill ap-propriate to a distinct class of games (1978:95), that is, the game of playing roles. More-over, Suits thinks “there is nothing about dra-matic skill which makes it inherently unsuitedto be the chief, rather than a severely subordi-nated, element of well-constructed games”(1978: 95). There might even be an importantsocial role for offering structured social occa-sions for adults to ‘take on roles’ and thus tofurnish “a much needed corrective of ourlusory institutions as they now exist” (1978:95). What does Suits mean here by lusory in-stitution? He first means the institution that is

a game. But it seems to me that he is also mak-ing a comment on the ‘range’ of ‘lusory pos-sibilities’ that a society offers. In this way wewould have as a social task the constructionof a social array of “game outlets” for the de-velopment and exercise of dramatic skills.

Can we specify a basic feature of such make-believe games? Suits writes:

“Each ‘move’ (if we may call it that) either isfor the purpose of evoking a dramatic re-sponse, or is such a response, or is both. Butthese evocations and responses really are evo-cations and responses; they are not merelyrepresentations of such interplay, as is the caseof staged performances. The players are, in away, writing a script at the same time that theyare enacting it” (1978: 110).

Looked at from the social point of view, whenwe are dealing with a two-role game, we couldsay that the job of each participant is to pro-vide the other “with opportunities for dramaticresponses” (1978: 110), leading to a “recipro-cating system of role-performance maximiza-tion” (1978: 112). Nevertheless, we can stillask about the validity and scope of the distinc-tion between ‘assumed’ roles, where we arenot ‘really’ what we are ‘playing’ at being, forexample, a lookout for a group of bank rob-bers dressed as a boy scout, and ‘proprietary’roles where, to be sure, we are playing a part -which is an objective structure - but a part withwhich we can identify. Suits argues that make-believe does not necessitate that the roles weperform are merely assumed roles (1978: 113).We can be what we make ourselves out to be.Make-believe - the imaginary - then becomesconstitutive of ‘what we are’.

Can we think of situations where we ‘play arole’ to such a degree that we play it whetherthe situation demands it or not, that is, inde-pendently of their social benefits? A spy or adouble agent is engaged in the deception ofother people, but we can also imagine caseswhere a person can only function, perform arole, when other people deceive him. A double

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agent is defined by being a ‘sneak’, while acompulsive performer of roles becomes a‘drag’. Caught up in performing roles that arethe core of his identity, the drag ignores thelogical demands of the situation. The situa-tions the bore and drag finds himself in arereally ‘inappropriate’ matrices for the perfor-mance of his roles, while a sneak’s roles areinappropriate to his own identity (1978: 124).Now, in games of make-believe, there is noneed to try to exploit real-life situations andno need, likewise, to maintain the distinctionbetween assumed and proprietary roles. ‘Sin-cerity’ and ‘insincerity’ have no force in agame of pure make-believe (1978: 125). Thecritical distinction is between a good and abad move in the game, not the psychologicalconstitution of the players. “For it is charac-teristic of games that quite divergent person-ality types can engage in the same game”(1978: 125). The game, then, has priority overthe individual player, whose consciousness isstructured by the game independently of theirpersonality type and personal prejudices. Inthis sense the game is an autonomous ‘world’.Gadamer, within the scope of a philosophicalhermeneutics, saw this clearly in the ‘play’ ofart, which clearly is a ‘game’ in Suits’s sensesince it transcends the private subjectivity ofthe perceiver or interpreter. In fact, the au-tonomy of art offers one of the clues to how toovercome the pathological situations of sneakand drag, who were caught, so Suits insists, inan existential logical fallacy. Their problemwas that they did not realize that they could“play dramatic games without having to ex-ploit real-life situations” (1978: 130). Learn-ing this, Suits notes, ‘cured’ them - or wouldcure them - of the fallacy.

Suits argues, further, that there are gameswhere one makes a ‘move’ in order to keepthe game going and so is following what hecalls “the principle of prolongation” (1978:131), which prevents premature terminationor aborting of the play. If a game or a move ina game were defective, if, for example, anexpert were playing an apprentice, it might be

necessary to try to ‘shore up’ the ‘rickety’structure so that the game can continue, so thatit can continue to be played, even if, from thepoint of view of its internal logic, it has a natu-ral termination point, with winners and los-ers. But the ‘fixing’ of such a game occursoutside the frame of the game itself. In the caseof Kierkegaard’s ‘Diary of a Seducer’, how-ever, we seem to be confronted with a game“whose prolongation is brought about bymoves in the game itself” (1978: 132).3 The‘game’ of Seduction can only be played as longas one has not actually seduced the object ofone’s ardor. The goal is to keep “moving thefinish line back, as it were, so that the racewill not end” (1978: 132). Such instances Suitsclassifies as ‘open games’. An ‘open game’ isone that has “no inherent goal whose achieve-ment ends the game: crossing a finish line,mating a king, and so on”, which are character-istics of open games. Seduction - the “seduc-tion enterprise” - is, to be sure, “an alreadyexisting goal-governed enterprise” (1978:133). But the Seducer in Kierkegaard’s taleexploits it by taking as his game not actualseduction but the process of seducing. He wasplaying a “two-person, two-role game wherethe other person was not a player but an un-witting and involuntary performer of the otherrole” (1978: 133). The Seducer is playing anexploitative game, to be sure, but it is still anopen one. An open game is technically definedby Suits as “a system of reciprocally enablingmoves whose purpose is the continued opera-tion of the system” (1978: 135). This classencompasses open athletic games (where themoves are bodily maneuvers) and games ofmake-believe (where the moves are dramaticperformances) (1978: 135). There is no “stateof affairs” that the players of open games arestriving to bring about. “They are simply com-mitted to striving indefinitely” (1978: 135).In a ‘ping-pong rally’, rather than a match of‘real’ ping-pong, the state of affairs is simplykeeping the ball in play, not scoring a point.

The distinction, then, between goal-gov-erned and role-governed games is not ultimate.

6

It is framed by a further distinction: betweenclosed and open games. “The distinction be-tween closed games and open games cutsacross the distinction between games like base-ball and games like Cops and Robbers” (1978:136). ‘Ping-pong rally’ and ‘Cops and rob-bers’ are both open games. Baseball and Cha-rades are both closed games. Further, while itis clear that open games have goals, can it alsobe said that they conform to the principle of“inefficient means?” The use of ping-pongpaddles depends on the skill of the players andto substitute some sort of machine to keep theball in play vitiates the game, much as the useof homing devices in golf would vitiate thelogic of the golf game. Games of make-be-lieve do not avail themselves of a script, whichwould be the equivalent of “playing a gameof solitaire with a stacked deck” (1978: 137).In a game such as ‘Cowboys and Indians’ it isa commonplace among children that they fre-quently dispute and argue about the legitimacyof certain moves. Why is that? Suits traces thedisagreements to the participants’ not beingclear on the distinction between open andclosed games. They transform the “purely dra-matic conflict of an open game” into the “genu-inely competitive conflict of a closed game”(1978: 137). But ‘Cowboys and Indians’ is notthe same type of game as football or hockey.More generally, “standard closed games areusually competitive games, whereas opengames appear to be essentially co-operativeenterprises” (1978: 137). Suits raises a dis-turbing social point. Are the societies thatemphasize closed games oriented toward “suc-cess through domination” while the societiesthat emphasize open games oriented toward“success through co-operation” (1978: 137)?Such a question will become important laterwhen we examine his notion of utopia and thefurther implications of the distinction between‘game-playing’ and ‘play’ qua tale.

The ‘lusory attitude’ is the fourth part ofSuits’s definition. What is its theoretical sta-tus? Suits tries to establish its viability prima-rily by contrasting amateurs and profession-

als playing the same game. It could be ob-jected, he notes, that the existence of profes-sional game players contravenes the necessityof the lusory attitude. But Suits will argue,rightly, that “professionals are genuine play-ers of games” (1978: 143), to be distinguishedfrom amateurs essentially by the fact that theyhave “some further purpose which is achiev-able by playing the game” other than playingthe game as an end in itself. Amateurs and pro-fessionals have different attitudes towardgames. A professional athlete may not be play-ing - if we mean by ‘playing’ engaging in anactivity for its own sake - but he is certainlyplaying a game. Why? Because he has thesame attitude towards the rules of the game asthe amateur, although they differ in their atti-tudes toward the game. Professionals may, andquite obviously do, use a game for their ownpurposes, but they use it by playing it, and thatmeans by obeying the constitutive rules of theactivity. Indeed, they play the game as an in-strumentality (1978: 146). Radical autotelismwould hold that authentic games must eschewall instrumentality whatsoever. Only amateurs,in such a case, would really be playing games.Suits, however, thinks that the additional con-sideration of pursuing an end for the sake ofanother end - that is, for example, playing agame for the sake money or fame - does notentail that one is not playing a game. Profes-sionals do play games. Radical instrumental-ism holds that games are essentially instru-ments to be subordinated to some other pur-pose. Radical instrumentalism holds thatgames are “essentially instruments for theachievement of prelusory goals” (1978: 147).But if that were so, Suits points out, radicalinstrumentalism would be self-defeating. “Ex-cessive dedication to the attainment of prelu-sory goals has the effect of destroying thegames in which those goals figure” (1978:147) by reason of the fact that one would cheat,break the rules, abandon the rules, if one could.Games are not just procedures for getting rub-ber disks into nets, breasting tapes, and soforth. They are, as noted, totally inefficient for

Focaal no. 37, 2001: pp. 1000-1000 7

that, just as “one of the worst ways to achievesome practical objective - building a house,closing a business deal, gaining sympatheticattention - would be to make that objectivethe prelusory goal of a game” (1978: 147).Such activities are governed by the principlesof efficient action. Games and life, Suitsthinks, place equal but irreconcilable demandson us. And between these two sets of demandswe must, in various situations, choose. But wemust also ask just how definitive and mutu-ally exclusive the choices are.

What, then, is the relation between the de-mands of life and the demands of games? Thedemands of life, to which we are all subject,induce the compulsion to work, the life of ants,who nevertheless would have no “reason towork if they achieved a condition of economicautonomy (i.e., independence)” (1978: 153).Now, it is a pivot of Suits’s position that play-ing genuine (not spurious Bernean) games is“precisely what economically and psychologi-cally autonomous individuals would findthemselves doing, and perhaps the only thingsthey would find themselves doing” (1978:153).4 What does this imply about the natureof games and further about the philosophicallogic of play and of the play of life?

What, indeed, does knowing what a game ishave to do with the thesis that “the life of theGrasshopper must be a life devoted to gameplaying rather than to trombone playing”(1978: 156)? Why not to intellectual inquiryor to love, both of which, it could be objected,have as much ‘autonomy’ as the playing ofgames? The point that Suits, through hismouthpiece the Grasshopper, is trying to sus-tain is that a life devoted to play is “the onlyjustification there can be for work, so that ifthere were no need for work, we would sim-ply spend all our time at play” (1978: 161).How, one might ask, are the concepts of ‘work’and ‘play’ being used here? Stipulatively, Suitsanswers, not descriptively. Suits, by his ownadmission, is not engaged in a phenomenol-ogy of play but in a kind of Confucian ‘recti-fication of names’. Work encompasses activ-

ity, which is instrumentally valuable; play en-compasses “all those activities which are in-trinsically valuable to those who engage inthem” (1978: 161). Trombone playing, itseems, would in that sense be ‘play’, but it isnot clear that it is a ‘game’. While the “life ofidleness” is a “life devoted exclusively to in-trinsically valuable activities” (1978: 161). Butnot all intrinsically valuable activities aregames. Games and play, on Suits’s analysis,are not synonymous. Games are a specific kindof play. Being intrinsically valuable does notmake, for example, scratching an itch or lis-tening to a symphony games. Games, as Suitsunderstands them, involve limitation. Writingor performing a symphony is a game, it wouldseem, but listening to it would not be. Listen-ing would be play (leisure), but not a game(and not work). But, on Suits’s reckoning, atrue Grasshopper would “sacrifice anythingand everything to be playing games”, know-ing as he does that this is what justifies hisexistence: engaging in structured activitieswhose point is found within themselves.Knowing this he “knows everything there isto know” (1978: 163). This seems, however,to be not a description, but a value judgmentor even an injunction.

Suits’s argument comes to a conclusion in afinal chapter devoted to an explicit chartingof the relation between his three pivotal con-cepts: 1) play, 2) game playing, 3) the ideal ofexistence (1978: 166). Suits notes that we can-not affirm that play, without conceptual ad-justments, can be identified with the ideal ofexistence. Rather, play “is necessary but notsufficient adequately to account for the idealof existence” (1978: 166). It is necessary inthat intrinsically valuable activities are essen-tial to this ideal. It is game playing that entersconstitutively into any complete or even pos-sible account of the ideal. Suits attempts tobring the concepts - play and game playing -into relation by following the Platonic liter-ary device from The republic, to wit, that thestate is the soul or psyche writ large. In placeof ‘the republic’ we have ‘Utopia’, “a state of

8

affairs where people are engaged only in thoseactivities which they value intrinsically”(1978: 167) and where all economic (and theirattendant) problems as well as all interpersonalproblems have been solved “by appropriatemethods” (1978: 167). What is there left to‘strive for’ in such a Utopia? What activitiesare ‘approved?’ Could we say, in good Aristo-telian voice, that what we approve of is “excel-lence in moral, artistic, and intellectual accom-plishment” (1978: 168)? Suits’s discussionhere is perplexing, for he seemingly tries todemolish all of them as proper activities inUtopia. On Suits’s analysis there is “no roomat all for morality in the ideal itself” (1978:169) for the absence of evil entails the absenceof the need for good deeds. Nor is there roomfor art, since, on the planes of both contentand form, it is inextricably connected with thekinds of human emotions that bespeak con-flict and lack, which would also be missing inUtopia. And in Utopia there would finally be“no scientists, philosophers, or any other intel-lectual investigators” (1978: 170), for every-thing would be automatically and effortlesslyknown.

It would seem, however, that the notion ofUtopia is scarcely intelligible once we grantthese anthropologically distressing conditions.But Suits has the Grasshopper insist that it isintelligible and that it is precisely game play-ing that makes it so. The problem is that Uto-pia as defined does not seem to offer us any-thing to do. There is, or would be, nothing tostrive for. Everything “has already beenachieved” (1978: 172). Suits thinks he has away out of this eminently perplexing situation.

What we need ... is some activity in whichwhat is instrumental is inseparably combinedwith what is intrinsically valuable, and wherethe activity is not itself an instrument for somefurther end. Games meet this requirement per-fectly. For in games we must have obstacleswhich we can strive to overcome just so thatwe can possess the activity as a whole, namely,playing the game. Game playing makes it pos-sible to retain enough effort in Utopia to make

life worth living (1978: 172).But, Suits asks, could we take otherwise in-

strumental activities as ends that are valued inthemselves? What if Utopia has not banishedall objectively instrumental activities but only“all activity which is not valued intrinsically”(1978: 173)? The “exertions of productivelabor” would then be available to any Uto-pian who wanted to engage in such activities.Looked at socially, such ‘game-work’ should(Suits’s stipulative orientation) be available toall, although in Utopia by definition no onewould be forced to undertake objectively in-strumental activity. Utopians always do things“because they want to, and never because theymust” (1978: 174). Carse will note, in Finiteand infinite games, that he who must play,cannot play. Suits ingeniously torques his ar-gument by moving from an objective to a sub-jective ‘take’ on Utopia. Utopia, it appears, isa state of consciousness, not a state of affairs‘in’ the world. It is a ‘stance’ or ‘position’ vis-à-vis the world. It defines the world; it is notdefined by it. When ‘John Striver’ in Utopiabecomes bored and wants to work at some-thing and thus chooses carpentry and sets him-self the task of building a house, he chooses ahouse whose construction “would give him thegreatest satisfaction”, within his abilities butwith sufficient challenge. It is the activity ofcarpentry, not the actual house, that is the goalof his endeavors. Just as it is the activity ofplaying golf and not the dropping of balls intoholes that defines it as the game that it is. Andwhen in Utopia, where the solutions to all in-tellectual problems are already known, ‘Will-iam Seeker’ tries to ‘work the answers out forhimself’, he is, in effect, playing a game. Theactivities are - in light of their goals of ‘hav-ing a house’ and ‘knowing the answer’ - inef-ficient, but they are meaningful and thereforenot pointless. All the activities which occur inthe non-Utopian world have in the Utopianworld a distinctive quality that marks them as“quite different” (1978: 175). It is, in the lastanalysis, a difference in attitude, in the forma-tion of subjectivity. It consists in recognizing

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that “all the things we now regard as trades,indeed all instances of organized endeavourwhatever, would, if they continued to exist inUtopia, be sports” (1978: 175-76). Not onlyhockey, tennis, badminton would be sports butalso “business administration, jurisprudence,philosophy, production management, motormechanics, ad, for all practical purposes, in-finitum” (1978: 176).

Suits asserts, by the mouth of the Grasshop-per, that “while game playing need not be thesole occupation of Utopia, it is the essence,the ‘without which not’ of Utopia”. The Uto-pian vision is of a culture “quite different fromour own in terms of its basis” (1978: 176).Our culture is “based on various kinds of scar-city - economic, moral, scientific, erotic”,while the culture of Utopia “will be based onplenitude” (1978: 176). Utopian institutionswill not be (or considered merely to be) in-struments, but institutions “which foster sportand other games” (1978: 176). Just as theGrasshopper is an “adumbration of the idealof existence” so the games of our non-Uto-pian lives are, if not actually paradigms, “inti-mations of things to come” (1978: 176).Games are “clues to the future. And their seri-ous cultivation now is perhaps our only salva-tion. That, if you like, is the metaphysics ofleisure time” (1978: 176). Josef Pieper, in hisLeisure, the basis of culture, has delineated arelated, but rather different metaphysics, fo-cussed on ‘transcendence’.5 But, for the mo-ment, we can ask, with Skepticus, whetherJohn Striver and William Seeker are likely “tofind quite futile their make-believe carpentryand their make-believe science” (1978: 177).What if everyone does not like to play games?Are we not looking at the “downfall of Uto-pia, a vision of paradise lost” (1978: 177)?What if in the final analysis the realization thattheir lives were “merely games” and thereforenot ‘serious’ led the Utopians to think that thecarpentry game and the science game were“not games at all, but vitally necessary taskswhich had to be performed in order for man-kind to survive” (1978: 177). What if, even

though “all the apparently productive activi-ties of man” really were - or should be - games,as defined, no one believed them to be so?And if they did believe it, “they would havefelt that their whole lives had been as nothing- a mere stage play or empty dream” (1978:177). The reason is that “life for most peoplewill not be worth living if they cannot believethat they are doing something useful, whetherit is providing for their families or formulat-ing a theory of relativity” (1978: 178). Doesthis vitiate the Grasshopper’s thesis about theideal of existence, which is to consist in gameplaying? Or does it indicate a deeply pessimis-tic position on the fate of mankind, which willnever accept the centrality of game playingfor an authentic human existence and thus loseout on realizing the ideal of existence? Theeternal battle between the useful and the ‘use-less’, between instrumentality and finality,appears here in starkest outline. How are weto so integrate the means into the end that theybecome a unity, both really and psychologi-cally? Are we irretrievably caught in an irre-solvable dialectic? Is the Utopian ideal of exis-tence at all coherent? Is it, in fact, even desir-able, much less possible?

James Carse, in his Finite and infinite games,gives us some indispensable conceptual toolsfor answering these questions which Suitsfiendishly leaves us with. They bear directlyon the central question of philosophy: Howare we to live our lives?

Finite and infinite games

The point of origin of Carse’s reflections isthe ringing thesis with which he begins hisbook: “There are at least two kinds of games.One could be called finite, the other infinite.A finite game is played for the purpose of win-ning, an infinite game for the purpose of conti-nuing the play” (1986: 3). This distinction runsparallel to Suits’s between open and closedgames, though they are not identical. Finitegames, of every sort, are first of all defined by

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the fact that they must come to a definite end.Further, central to Carse’s conception is thethesis that whoever plays a finite game mustplay freely. It is a character of all play that“whoever must play cannot play” (1986: 89).The ‘experienced necessity’ within the game,as played, is separated by a gap from the ‘ac-tual freedom’ of finite players to step off thefield of play at any time” (1986: 15). Playentails, in this respect, a radical freedom: fi-nite play involves freedom within boundaries(temporal, spatial, numerical), infinite playfreedom with boundaries. Moreover, althoughfinite games can only be won or lost by oneperson or team, the others who have partici-pated in the game can be ranked (as runnersup of various sorts). Again, the seriousnessthat is attendant upon playing within any fi-nite game is counter posed by the fact that in-finite players, as opposed to finite players, playfinite games playfully, not seriously. The rea-son is that, for Carse, the concept of serious-ness is connected with the notion of a scriptthat would predefine the actual outcome of anygame. But following rules in a finite game isnot following a script. Echoing a central no-tion of Suits’s, Carse claims that “the rules ofa finite game do not constitute a script (...) Inall true finite play the scripts are composed inthe course of play” (1986: 21). This meansthat during the game all finite play is dramatic,and hence open, that is, not predetermined inoutcome. The theatricality of the game comesfrom the fact that the game has an outcomeand thus that there is an ‘outside’ to it. In thissense, one can understand Carse’s commentthat “dramatically, one chooses to be a mother;theatrically, one takes on the role of mother”(1986: 20). This is his parallel to Suits’s dis-tinction between proprietary and assumedroles. One is a mother, not just playing at be-ing one (1986: 19).

While, as we saw, according to Suits’s origi-nally ‘objective’ approach, as we saw, “gamesare (...) essentially different from the ordinaryactivities of life”, unless we ‘torque’ our vi-sion, for Carse it is precisely as games that

such activities are to be seen. In spite of ap-pearances to the contrary, one cannot play agame alone, first and foremost because one isbound to rules, a thoroughly social concept,as Wittgenstein was at pains to show. Gamesimply, in an extended sense, an ‘other’ withwhich (or whom) one is brought into play, evenif the play is ‘solitary’. Playing by oneself stillmeans submitting to an overarching structuralmatrix, no matter how simple. Carse’s notionof play and games is, hence, resolutely social.To become a self, to play the infinite game of‘selfing’, to recognize oneself as the ‘geniusof oneself’ that one is and to become human,is not a task that one can perform by oneself(1986: 45).6 There is, in this sense, no ‘oneperson’ game. Carse’s metaphysical, existen-tial, and social vision is based on the bedrockinsight that “our social existence has (...) aninescapably fluid character” (1986: 45). Theself is not a thing, an innerworldly object withstable and permanent properties. The ‘player’,that we are, is constantly brought ‘into play’in such a way that it is our lives, and not just(or primarily) the contexts in which we livethem out, that are fluid. “As in the Zen im-age”, he writes, “we are not the stones overwhich the stream of the world flows; we arethe stream itself” (1986: 45). Change, stream-ing, “is the principle by which infinite playerslive” (1986: 45). This poses us “an unavoid-able challenge: how to contain the seriouswithin the truly playful; that is, how to keepall our finite games in infinite play” (1986:46). To do so would be to arrive at a kind ofCarsean Utopia, which runs parallel to Suits’sand like it attempts to articulate a normativeideal of existence - whether it can be realizeduniversally or in fact or not.

What are, then, the principal finite gamesthat we should learn to keep in infinite play?What are the consequences of not doing so?How far does the scope and analytical bite ofthe distinction between finite and infinitegames extend?

First of all, it enables Carse to argue thatpolitics, the sphere of power par excellence,

Focaal no. 37, 2001: pp. 1000-1000 11

is essentially theatrical, not dramatic. It is afinite game with a vengeance. But, in his con-ception, “infinite players do not take sides inpolitical issues - at least not seriously” (1986:49). Rather, they do so dramatically, “attempt-ing to offer a vision of continuity and open-endedness in place of the heroic final scene”(1986: 49). The reason is that for Carse thepolitics of an infinite player is defined withinthe space of a further pivotal - model-theo-retical or stipulative - distinction between so-ciety and culture. “Society”, thinks Carse, “ap-plies only to those areas of action which arebelieved to be necessary” (1986: 49). In thissense society is the sphere of Suits’s funda-mentally Aristotelian notion of ‘work’. But inlight of Carse’s thematic extension of the no-tion of game playing to every sphere of life,the ‘work of society’ is for Carse really a game,both objectively and subjectively. Accordingto him, to think rightly of society is to “thinkof it as a single finite game that includes anynumber of smaller games within its bound-aries”, such as schools (1986: 50) and othercompetitive institutions whose functions arenot just to confer “entitlements” but also toelicit patriotic efforts from the ‘winners’ tomaintain the boundaries of the institutionsupon which such entitlements depend (1986:52). The winners of societal competitions, nomatter who they are, will be “those most likelyto defend the society as a whole against itscompetitors” (1986: 52). In this sense, as Carsesees it, society is the domain of property, oftitles that give right to property: that is, a sys-tem of entitlements. These entitlements aremaintained by force, by law, by police, by allthe panoptical devices a metaphysical Bent-ham could devise. The distinctiveness of Car-se’s approach is that he holds that property istheatrical, not dramatic, that it has “an elabo-rate structure that property owners must be atconsiderable labor to sustain” (1986: 58). Pro-perty becomes emblematic by constantlydrawing attention to entitlements that havebeen earned and so must be seen as compen-sation for the difficulty of winning it. It must

further be seen to be consumed. But how doesconsumption show itself? Carse rather per-plexingly, and perhaps counter intuitively, an-swers that it shows itself “in the mode of lei-sure, even indolence” (1986: 61). What heseems to mean by this is that property in theform of wealth is “not so much possessed as itis performed” for an audience that confers legi-timacy and confirmation on the performers.The theater of wealth, just as the theater ofpower, needs an audience - a fact that is ap-parent to infinite players who, to the utter con-sternation of finite players, take the serious-ness of the pursuit of wealth (and power)lightly. Wealth, property, and power, for aninfinite player, are nothing serious. Delimitedas they are spatially, temporally, and numeri-cally, they are finite games played within thepeculiar compound space defined by powerbetween and over persons and power betweenand over things. To have a title and to be en-titled, consequently, both belong to the socialsphere of power. But power is a finite game ifthere ever was one and it belongs essentiallyto the finite game of society not to the infinitegame of culture.

Secondly, then, society, as the set of all fi-nite games, is itself located within culture asan “infinite game” (1986: 52). Carse assertsquite boldly that while society is defined bylimits, culture has no limits. It understands it-self as history, that is, “as a narrative that hasbegun but points always toward the endlesslyopen” (1986: 52). Culture, as Carse is usingthe term, is the very opposite of closedness,rigidity, and foreseeableness, of scripts andrules. “Deviancy”, he writes, is the “very es-sence of culture” (1986: 53), which followsno antecedently written script. Cultural devia-tion is not repetition or return but creativecontinuation. “Society has all the seriousnessof immortal necessity; culture resounds withthe laughter of unexpected possibility” (1986:54) that issues from the unending struggle tomake meaning. While societies fight to main-tain a fixed tradition and normative interpre-tation of themselves - going so far as to en-

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force it by the use of the police and army -culture (not cultures) does not, strictly speak-ing, “have a tradition; it is a tradition” (1986:55). Culture is not (nor is the self) for Carse a‘thing’ with definite boundaries. It is the cre-ative process of overcoming all boundaries andlogics of boundary settings while at the sametime recognizing that humans are double-eyed:they both set boundaries and see the settingsas ‘settings’. It is the forgetfulness of the set-tings, or positings, that lead one to becomeonly a finite player in society and in life. “It isessential to the identity of a society to forgetthat it has forgotten that society is always aspecies of culture” (1986: 55), that is, a par-ticular configuration of meanings and relationsthat are by no means necessary.

Thirdly, Carse argues that ‘culture’ is pro-cess not product, poiesis not poiema. Truepoietai - which we all ‘really’ are or should be- ignore “all lines whatsoever and concernthemselves with bringing the audience backinto play - not competitive play, but play thataffirms itself as play” (1986: 66). Society -Suits’s non-utopian world - is confounded,Carse thinks, not by serious opposition but by“the lack of seriousness altogether” (1986: 66).This is certainly maximally exemplified by theGrasshopper and what society can only con-sider his perverse logic. Carse’s vision of lifeand of culture is in fact the Grasshopper’s.Because it is poiesis, activity, origination - notresult or product - ”art is dramatic, openingalways forward, beginning something that can-not be finished” (1986: 67). As exemplifiedin art, for example, culture’s telic aim is toengender creativity in its beholders (1986: 67),to solicit their participation in the play of origi-nation. While society has boundaries, culture,in Carse’s terminology, has horizons. Horizonsare creative because they make up the openspace of surprise. A horizon “opens onto allthat lies beyond itself” (1986: 69). It is an ec-static structure, in Heidegger’s sense.7 Theinfinite player moves toward the horizon,while the finite player moves within a bound-ary (1986: 70). “Who lives horizontally is

never somewhere, but always in passage”(1986: 70). Setting up boundaries, that is, be-ing somewhere, entails absolutizing time,space, and number, the very marks of finitegames. But the infinite play of culture allowsus to enter it anywhere and anytime. Whileany finite game - any instance of finite play -is limited and hence bounded, what undoesits boundaries and thus takes away its ultimateseriousness is “the awareness that it is our vi-sion, and not what we are viewing, that is lim-ited” (1986: 75). Hence the task of the poets -the poietai - is to seek and engender aware-ness of limits as limits (1986: 76) and not totie us to objects. In the last analysis, thinksCarse, “one cannot learn an object, but onlypoiesis, or the act of creating objects” (1986:78). In culture ‘genius’ calls out to ‘genius’ inthe mutual enlargement and fusion of horizons.

The important distinction between horizonsand boundaries that Carse utilizes is furtherextended by his cognate distinction betweenseeing and looking. Bluntly, to look is a modeof vision within limits. To see is the transcend-ing of limits in that to truly ‘see’ is to see notthe object but the positing of the object as anobject, or the playing of the game as a game.Seeing, as Carse uses the notion, does not dis-turb looking. In creating the very outlines ofthings it knows that they are outlines that havebeen drawn. Infinite seeing is thus the freeingof vision from the power of the past whichdefines finite play and its opening toward thepower of the open future. In infinite seeingwe are touched by what we see; in finite look-ing we are moved. “Touch is a characteristi-cally paradoxical phenomenon of infiniteplay” (1986: 90) and is dramatic. Moving,accordingly, on Carse’s analysis is theatricalsince it is a bounded phenomenon. We aretouched when we ourselves, as selves, arebrought into play and ‘into the open’. We aremoved when we find ourselves ‘in anotherplace’ or within a new set of limits. This be-comes especially clear in Carse’s analysis ofsexuality, which certainly transcends Suits’slaconic reference to the “standard sexual act”,

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though it is clearly connected with Suits’s in-sightful discussion of Kierkegaard’s ‘Diary ofa Seducer’.

Sexuality in Carse’s understanding is a phe-nomenon of touching par excellence (1986:93) and it illustrates in perspicuous fashionthe nature of the distinction between finite andinfinite games and finite and infinite players.Carse has a stark observation: “Sexuality isthe only finite game in which the winner’s prizeis the defeated opponent” (1986: 95). Finitesexuality belongs to Suits’s category of a com-petitive game, but it is a singularly perversegame, for in sexuality - Carse thinks “only insexuality” but perhaps we should also includeslavery and maybe even forms of incarcera-tion - ”persons themselves become property”(1986: 95). Finite sexuality is a form of the-ater (1986: 99). It is a “veiled” sexuality (thatis, a sexuality that does not know itself in itsessential possibility) and “as with all finiteplay, the goal of veiled sexuality is to bringitself to an end” (1986: 99). The “standardsexual act” has as its end, theatrically intended,orgasm. To fail to achieve orgasm is to lose.In the case of seduction, to fail to possess theother person, or to fail to elicit their yielding,is also to lose. But for Carse the very unilate-rality of seduction makes the ensuing sexualcommerce into a finite game. Kierkegaard’sSeducer is playing a finite game even if, inSuits’s terms, it is open. Seduction is paradoxi-cally an open finite game, bounded but stran-gely unlimited. But for infinite players, whichthe Seducer certainly is not, “sexuality is nota bounded phenomenon but a horizonal pheno-menon” (1986: 100). The Seducer is still play-ing within sexual boundaries - he knows ex-actly what he is not trying to attain - whileinfinite players do not play within sexualboundaries but ‘with’ sexual boundaries, atype of play that is only feigned by the Se-ducer. The reason, Carse rightly affirms, is thatthe finite sexual player is ultimately concernedwith power, the infinite sexual player with vi-sion (1986: 100). Unlike the Seducer, whohides, or pretends to hide, his intentions from

the object of his ardor, “there is nothing hid-den in infinite sexuality. Sexual desire is ex-posed as sexual desire and is never thereforeserious” (1986: 101). In infinite play “lack ofsatisfaction is never a failure, but only a mat-ter to be taken on into further play” (1986:101). Carse affirms a paradox of infinite sexu-ality: “by regarding sexuality as an expressionof the person and not the body, it becomes fullyembodied play. It becomes a drama of touch-ing” (1986: 102). Touching, in this sense, be-comes, as Suits would put it, an intrinsicallyvaluable activity, but as dramatic there is nopregiven script. It is not a means to an end. Itis the end, but it is an open end, without aprelusory goal. Here, as Suits prescribed, themeans are integrated into the end, so that wehave an intrinsically valuable continuum ofmeans-end relationships, a point central to Irv-ing Singer’s aesthetic configuration of mean-ing in life.

Strangely enough, for Carse the “triumphof finite sexuality is to be liberated from playinto the body. The essence of infinite sexual-ity is to be liberated into play with the body.In finite sexuality I relate to you as a body; ininfinite sexuality I expect to relate to you inyour body” (1986: 102). Looked at this way,sexual engagement is a “poiesis of free per-sons” (1986: 102), which Kierkegaard’s Se-ducer has no intention of engaging in, sincetrue sexual desire would entail the ‘genius’ ofan infinite responder.

Finite games, Carse notes, occur within a‘world’. “World”, he says, in quasi-Wittgen-steinian mode, “exists in the form of audience.A world is not all that is the case, but that whichdetermines all that is the case” (1986: 108).World is not a fact, but the frame of facts.World is not a thing, but the matrix of things.The notion of world is thus theatrical: it notesa domain that is governed by rules. Games -think now also of Suits’s comprehensive list-ing - have to be placed “in the absolute di-mensions of a world” (1986: 108). As Schut-zian ‘finite provinces of meaning’ worlds al-low us to “place” games. The “temporal and

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spatial boundaries of a finite game must beabsolute - in relation to an audience or a world.But when and where a world occurs, andwhom it includes, is of no importance” (1986:109). The reason (and the terminology, derivedfrom Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology ofexistence) is that “finite players need the worldto provide an absolute reference for under-standing themselves; simultaneously, theworld needs the theater of finite play to re-main a world” (1986: 109). Indeed, a world isa theater of finite play. Likewise, each ofSuits’s games constitutes a world, a Huizinganludic space, whether agonistically conceivedor not. But since worlds are originated in pro-cesses of cultural poiesis and since there is nogreatest upper bound to the spiraling dialecticof world creation, there is no definite numberof worlds (1986: 110). This is a truly utopianinsight. But, at the same time, finite playerscannot become a world without being dividedagainst themselves or alienated (1986: 111).Finite players consume time, periodicize it,stand outside it, and therefore turn it, by di-viding it, into theatrical time. “It is not a timelived, but a time viewed - by both players andaudience” (1986: 113). Infinite players gene-rate time, live the time, not view it (look at it)(1986: 113). For the infinite player time is‘momentous’, a perpetual beginning of “anevent that gives the time within it its specificquality” (1986: 114). While the finite playerputs play into time, the infinite player puts timeinto play, and thus engenders possibility. Infi-nite players, nevertheless, can play any num-ber of finite games and can even join the au-dience for these games without ceasing to beinfinite players. In doing so they join in “theplay that is in observing (...). They look, butthey see that they are looking” (1986: 115).Looking and seeing return as bounded andunbounded vision, a double vision that marks,indeed defines, the dweller in Utopia.

Carse is also able to bring language into thespace of the distinction between finite and in-finite play, principally by relating in a new waythe speakable to what he, paradoxically at first

glance, considers the domain of the utterlyunspeakable, that is, nature itself. The ‘play’of language is of course a central theme intwentieth-century philosophy, with whichCarse is obviously familiar. Carse’s principalpoint, baldly stated, is that language does notmirror an already spoken (and speaking) na-ture, so that human language would be in thatsense either, on the one hand, derivative or,on the other hand, able to exhaust nature. Na-ture, on Carse’s conception, is speechless. It‘says’ nothing on its own but only ‘speaks’ tous as we question it. We are the speakers ofnature, but it is not nature’s speech that weutter. It is, and remains, our own. Language,consequently, is not ‘bound’. It is a creativesemiotic instrument that “remains absolutelyunlike whatever it is about” (1986: 123) - in-deed, it is itself the source of likenesses, whichemerge out of the essentially metaphoric driveof articulation. Metaphor bears unmistakablewitness to the truth that the word is not thething, that reality is not identical with the signsthat refer to it and give it voice. This identitywould be, in spite of its absoluteness, the iden-tity of the finite. The voice (of nature) remainsour voice, not the voice of nature - which isirretrievably silent. We can, as result, neverrid ourselves of language: not through an irre-ducibly right naming (the last word) and notthrough some absolute technical mastery ofnature. For Carse, nature and history are asdistinct as explanation and narrative are dis-tinct and both entail very different kinds oflanguage. Such an observation leads to theastounding contention that “if the silence ofnature is the possibility of language, languageis the possibility of history” (1986: 125), whichis essentially dramatic both in its performanceand in its ‘accounting/recounting’. But, the‘speakability’ of history is never total, not ableto be brought to closure, for there is no stableor permanently fixed vantage point outside ofit for any ‘voice of the master’. This has, inthe last analysis, deep consequences whichtranscend the scope of this paper: “the un-speakability of nature is (...) transformed into

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the unspeakability of language itself” (1986:130). ‘Unspeakability’ entails infinitude,‘speakability’, finitude.

The universal relevance of metaphor is foundhere, for it exemplifies the essential opennessof speech and language (discourse), an opengame in Suits’s sense. An infinite speaker rec-ognizes the essential metaphoricity of langu-age. A finite speaker claims to so have graspedthe ‘thing itself’ through language that it en-ters the realm of the necessary. But languageis not nature. The infinite ‘play’ of nature isonly accessible through the infinite ‘play’ oflanguage and all the finite provinces of mean-ing it makes possible. Although Carse doesnot mention it, this whole set of distinctions isreminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s distinctionbetween originated and originating language,the latter arising out of silence or the prethe-matic. “Infinite discourse”, Carse writes, “al-ways arises from a perfect silence” (1986:131). “Infinite speakers must wait to see whatis done with their language by the listenersbefore they can know what they have said”(1986: 131). It involves a sharing of a visionimpossible without the response of the listener(1986: 131). Infinite speech is an address inthe form of listening (1986: 132). “Finitespeech ends with a silence of closure. Infinitespeech begins with a disclosure of silence”(1986: 133). Storytellers - mythmakers, are,in the end, concerned not with truth but withvision (1986: 133).

Language, then, for Carse is itself caught inthe dialectic of finite and infinite games. Fi-nite speech, he devastatingly shows, betraysits own finitude when it strives toward a formof ‘Master Speech’ - a word to end all words.For Carse this is an impossibility. It wouldimply having attained a standpoint outside ofall discourse wherein discourse itself wouldbe mastered. But we are never totally outsideof speech. There is no standpoint either out-side of nature or outside of history. Speechitself, as opposed to any particular discourse,is an infinite game, for it has no greatest up-per bound. Bound by rules that define the goal

of any particular dialogic or discursive ‘move’,finite speech must come to acknowledge, andthus become infinite, that it is always situated,an embodied perspective. Because infinitespeech emerges out of a matrix of silence, it isnot scripted nor can we, authentically, as fi-nite speakers, look upon our speech purelytheatrically. Infinite speech is dramatic, nottheatrical. Indeed, so dramatic is it that we canbe, and should be, and often are constantlysurprised by what we say. We speak by listen-ing (to the thing-meant) and by listening toothers listen. Finite speech aims toward clo-sure. Infinite speech spirals upward in a wid-ening gyre. In this sense, the essential open-endedness of language brings us into play, asemiotic play, giving rise to ‘signitive happen-ings’ (in Josef Simon’s sense of that term inhis Philosophy of the Sign).9 While the notionof a ‘language game’ has been extensivelyexploited since the dissemination of Wittgen-stein’s Philosophical investigations, Carse hasdone something even more radical: fore-grounded not just the limits of language (thetheme of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), but theself-aware ‘limiting’ function of language, itsstatus as poiesis and not as poiema, as origi-nation and not as originated. Suits has noth-ing comparable here, but Carse has clearlyindicated that language (and speech) is theinfinite use of finite means. Infinity arises outof (and is recognized in) radical finitude. Aninfinite speaker recognizes that only by em-bodying himself in finite means (Suits’s prin-ciple of inefficiency) and eschewing the vainhope of going directly to the object (cheating)can he ‘say’ anything at all. And only on thisbasis can he listen to what he says so that hecan actually hear it.

Carse is able to show that even the relationbetween technology and nature, that is, thecontrol of nature for societal reasons, is sub-ject to the logic of finite and infinite games. Afinite game, mediated through ‘the machine’,aims toward domination, in which nature, byreason of intelligible laws, plays the unwit-ting role of collaborating in its own control.

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The ‘machine’, which for Carse metaphori-cally stands for the ‘mechanical’ and does notrefer to any specific or concrete apparatus, hasa peculiar logic that is imposed on all its us-ers. Admitting that prediction is nothing butexplanation looking forward, Carse notes thatthe essence of technology is the reduction ofsurprise, hence a scripting, a stabilization andclosing of the circuit of our relation to naturein light of our needs. But this stabilization alsostabilizes our needs as well as, and especially,our conception of our needs, which then be-come tailored to the ‘machine’s’ logic. Themachine not only, quite unproblematically, em-bodies and mediates our needs but, certainlyproblematically, yokes our needs to it. In linewith his general procedure of situating the fi-nite within the matrix of the infinite, Carsecounterposes the infinite play of the ‘garden’to the finite play of the ‘machine’. The ‘gar-den’, as interpretative category, metaphoricallyprojects the deepest meanings of spontaneousgrowth and interiority onto our relations withnature. While machines are configured withinthe space of ‘moving’, or force and its harnes-sing, gardens are cultivated or ‘touched’ (andtouch us). Gardens, in Carse’s frame, are dra-matic, while machines are theatrical. Gardensbelong to culture, machines to society. Gar-dens deal with growth, machines with control.

It is clear that Carse is not engaged in ananti-machine or anti-technological diatribe. Itis the dialectic of necessity and spontaneitythat interests him, for he sees technology as amaximally finite societal game within themaximally infinite cultural game of making-meaning in the dramatic mode. To ‘play’, quitegenerally, is to make meaning and to make itprecisely in playing. Carse’s point is deeplyecological: any relation to nature that does notrespect both the spontaneity of things, ex-pressed in the notion that nature has its own‘genius’, and our own (cultural) spontaneity(and ‘genius’) as meaning makers encloses usin an irretrievably finite game. Technology it-self is a game, in Suits’s sense of that term.Carse’s concern is to keep it from becoming a

closed game, defined by a set of societal mean-ings and goals that totalize control, prediction,and competition. For him culture is the realmof freedom and openness, the envisaging ofnew possibilities outside of all current frames.To take the present technological ‘world’ asthe world is to reify it, to treat it as a form ofnature rather than as a societal choice, whichitself is only a species of culture.

“If indifference to nature leads to the ma-chine”, Carse explains, “the indifference ofnature leads to the garden. All culture has theform of gardening: the encouragement of spon-taneity in others by way of one’s own, the re-spect for source, and the refusal to convertsource into resource” (1986: 151). Gardeningfrees us from the tyranny of instrumental ratio-nality and obsession with goals. It is a para-digm Utopian activity. “One never arrives any-where with a garden” (1986: 153). “A gardenis a place where growth is found” (1986: 153).Gardening, in Carse’s conception, encom-passes: teaching, parenting, working with, lov-ing each other (1986: 153). The logic of thegarden even reveals to us what it means to trulytravel (1986: 153). “Genuine travel has no des-tination. Travelers do not go somewhere, butconstantly discover that they are somewhereelse” (1986: 154). This being somewhere elseis the essence of growth. It means treatingoneself and others as a source and being dra-matically open to no end of variations.

“When society is unveiled, when we see thatit is whatever we want it to be, that it is a spe-cies of culture with nothing necessary in it, byno means a phenomenon of nature or a mani-festation of instinct, nature is no longer shapedand fitted into one or another set of societalgoals. Unveiled, we stand before a naturewhose only face is its hidden self-origination:its genius” (1986: 159).

I take this to be an echo of Spinoza’s distinc-tion between natura naturans and naturanaturata, that is, between nature consideredas originative process and nature considered

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as originated, without, however, any claim thatthere are two natures. They are the two facesof one and the same nature. Indeed, “we seenature as genius when we see as genius” (1986:159). For Carse “our own self-origination can-not be stated as a fact” (1986: 159) any morethan Utopia can become a fact, an actual‘place’. “For the infinite player, seeing as ge-nius, nature is the absolutely unlike” (1986:160). It does not feed us without our effort. Atthe same time it not the object of mere effort,nor can it be forced. Although, in the Jewishand Islamic traditions, we have responsibilityfor the garden, this does not mean that

“we can make a garden of nature, as though itwere a poiema of which we could take pos-session. A garden is not something that wehave, over which we stand as gods. A gardenis a poiesis, a receptivity to variety, a visionof differences that leads always to a makingof differences. The poet joyously suffers theunlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing,possesses nothing” (1986: 161).

Carse ringingly affirms that there is no oneand nothing that belong essentially to myscript. This is his way of tackling the issue oftechnological rationality and technologicaldomination. It is highly reminiscent of theFrankfurt School’s critique of instrumentalrationality, the gradual spread of ‘utilitarian’demands over the social world and over na-ture, which is transformed from source to re-source, paralleling the transformation of hu-man beings into ‘human capital’ under thesway of a universal ‘productivity’ understoodin technological or economic terms. The infi-nite player is the enlightened and autonomousplayer. Carse puts his point this way: “Thehomelessness of nature, its utter indifferenceto human existence, disclose to the infiniteplayer that nature is the genius of the dramatic”(1986: 161). Being both autonomous and ut-terly indifferent to us, nature brings us intoplay in the most radical form possible. Wecannot stand outside of ourselves or outside

of nature and hence we cannot, without losingourselves, play a solely finite game with na-ture nor with ourselves. This insight is groundzero for Carse, the one knowledge worth hav-ing. Recognizing that there is no defined out-side, that is, no frame or bounds to our finiteboundaries, to our finite games, is the recog-nition that there is “but one infinite game”(1986: 177). This is the continually performedinsight that grounds, indeed, constitutes Uto-pia. It is the knowledge possessed by theGrasshopper.

Philosophy and the ‘play’ of life

I have tried to show, in shorthand and exceed-ingly schematic fashion, how these marvelousbooks engage and clarify philosophical ques-tions of universal scope and exemplify, in boththeir motivations and their rhetorical forms,distinctively philosophical ‘takes’ on play.They are not only about play - and games -but also themselves forms of philosophicalplay, ‘moves’ in the great game of philosophi-cal reflection. But they are also philosophicalreflections on life and how it should be lived.It is deeply significant that the subtitles of bothbooks contain the word ‘life’. Suits joins‘games, life and utopia’ together, while Carsedetails “a vision of life as play and possibil-ity’. Their books are as much existential chal-lenges as intellectual explorations of the top-ics they so illuminatingly discuss. Their con-ceptual frameworks and pivotal distinctionsare essential components in any attempt to the-matize play in a distinctively ‘philosophical’way.

Suits makes a strong and compelling casefor a purely formal definition of ‘playing agame’. Games have prelusory goals, realizedby lusory means in accordance with constitu-tive rules which are accepted, in a specificallylusory attitude, in order to make a specificactivity possible. This is, in short, a four-fac-tor definition of games. The exploration of theinner logic of this definition allows Suits to

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establish a set of distinctions that can func-tion as the formal frame for any further phe-nomenological, cultural, or historical investi-gation of games. Games can be open games,such as ‘Cops and robbers’, ‘ping-pong rally’,and so on, or closed games, such as baseball,golf, basketball, and so forth. Games can becompetitive (agonistic) games, where there aredefinite winners and losers, or cooperativegames, where the participants are concernedto offer other participants opportunities fordramatic self-(re)presentation. While competi-tive games eo ipso must be rule-governed(anything does not go, a universal free-for-allis not a game), cooperative games are prima-rily role-governed, spaces wherein we take onassumed and proprietary roles. Play is to bedistinguished from work as intrinsically valu-able activity is to be distinguished from in-strumental activity. Play is activity for its ownsake; work is activity for the sake of some-thing else. It would appear that we work inorder to play and that, consequently, play is a‘higher’ activity than work. Play and work arethen related as ‘free’ activity to ‘bound’ ac-tivity. Nevertheless, playing is not the sameas playing games.

Games involve limitation, but free limitation- or limitation freely accepted, namely, to actin accordance with the demands of the four-factors. Deviation from these factors in vari-ous ways makes one into a trifler, a cheat, or aspoilsport. The distinction between assumedand proprietary roles clarifies the relation ofgames of ‘make-believe’ such as ‘house’,where there is a clearly demarcated inside andoutside, to the existential games of a) ‘sneaks’or ‘impostors’, who exploit real life situationsin order to take on and manipulate assumedroles, and b) of ‘drags’, who exploit real lifesituations (consisting in the responses of oth-ers) in order to play out proprietary roles, thatis, roles with which they have identified.Suits’s definition allows a clear specificationof the difference between amateurs and pro-fessionals. The notion of a cooperative game- especially games of make-believe - illumi-

nates the issue of scripts and their relations torules. Scripts are not roles and rules are notscripts. Scripts entail definition of outcome orresult. Rules determine only procedures forarriving at an outcome, not which particularoutcome there will be.

Utopia, as Suits wickedly conceives it, wouldconsist in a realization of the ‘ideal of exist-ence’. Such an ideal makes the goal of life notplaying, but the ‘playing of games’, the en-gaging in structured activities for the sake ofthe activity itself. What stands in the way ofUtopia’s becoming a reality? The presentworld is organized not on the principle of ple-nitude but on the principle of scarcity. Wherethere is scarcity there is necessity and conse-quently involuntary limitation. And wherethere is involuntary limitation there is no play-ing of games. Utopia would have to be builton the principle of plenitude. All limitationson activities would have to be voluntary, ac-cepted for the sake of the activities they makepossible and apart from the means-end matrixof instrumental action and rationality. All‘practical’ activities would be unnecessary inUtopia. But likewise all ‘intellectual’, ‘moral’,and ‘aesthetic’ activities that had the slightestconnection with lack or necessity. The onlything left ‘to do’ in Utopia would be to playgames, in infinite variety and of unheard ofdifficulty and complexity. There would, how-ever, be no need to play games. One playsfreely or one is not playing. One steps into themagic circle of a game in order to play it, butone does not have to make the step.

The main question we are left with fromSuits, and in fact the question he himself leavesus with at the end of his book, is whether ‘Uto-pia’, as defined, would, or even could, be ac-cepted as the ideal of existence by mankindas a whole. Can mankind accept an ideal ofexistence - something toward which it shouldstrive - that entails the actual abolition of theneed to do anything useful (1978: 178)? Canhuman existence be defined as culminating inactivities - the playing of games - whose onlypoint lies within themselves and which are not

Focaal no. 37, 2001: pp. 1000-1000 19

‘serious’, that is, not necessary and accomplishno purpose? Suits proposes, as a possible an-swer to these questions, that we could, indeedshould, consider all - ad infinitum - the ordi-nary instrumental activities and institutions oflife as being really games. This would meanmaking a game, and not just a virtue, out ofnecessity. It seems to be the deepest implica-tion of Suits’s paradoxical argument that if,per hypothesin, we are forced to accept thedesired or postulated irreducibility of the use-ful, then we are set a social and personal task:so to arrange the means of attaining the usefulthat they cannot be separated from the endspursued. This would introduce constitutiverules and so integrate means into ends that theywould form a true continuum and whole. Butworking with the means themselves would alsohave to be something that we would like todo, something that we could find ourselves in.This is, in fact, the aesthetic deal proposed byDewey in his classic Art as experience underthe rubric of a ‘consummatory (that is, non-utilitarian or non-instrumental) experience’and developed by Irving Singer (1992, 1994,1996), Joseph Kupfer (1983), Crispin Sartwell(1995), and Richard Shusterman (1992), andInnis (1983 and 1987) in various ways.

But, one must ask, in real life situations,would one ever choose inefficient means? Onewould if there were a deep pleasure or happi-ness attendant upon the activity of workingwith the means. The means can become in theirown way ends or intrinsic to the realization ofthe ends. This is clearly the case with ‘game-playing’, which is the solving a self-set prob-lem and with the play of art (see Gadamer1986: 1-53, 123-30). But what about ‘life-playing’? In the present economy of scarcity -but is it only ‘present’? - we must find a wayto live with the means given us. We do not setthe means on our own accord. They are givenby nature and by society as social and naturalconstraints. Following rules, or utilizingmeans, entails submitting to mediation, tolimitation. We may exploit the rules, but wecannot circumvent them. Therefore, to the de-

gree possible, we should strive to so structurethe rules that they are integrated into the ac-tivity and become the most efficient means ofachieving the goal, given the means. The prob-lem concerns the constitution of means. Itwould have to be a conceptual decision on thepart of mankind to constitutively take theirlives and all its constitutive activities and in-stitutions as games and consequently as some-thing that they should cultivate for their ownsakes. Suits’s point is not descriptive; it is pre-scriptive. But it does not presuppose that theideal of existence can ever become a full real-ity. The ironic and paradoxical tone of his par-able in dialogue form leaves us with a Socraticaporia. We experience the stupefaction of ourown speechlessness at the end of readingSuits’s elegant parable, a veritable likely story.Such a stupefaction points to the infinite taskof finding a way to mediate between the use-ful and the useless. If life is (or ought to be)the playing of games, and such play is uselessin the sense of serving no other end than inbeing played, then life is useless in the sensedefined. Life’s telic aim, if not its present re-ality, is to be played for itself. Consequentlyneither Sisyphus nor Prometheus seem forSuits to be acceptable paradigms of existence.Suits’s model is in fact an ingenious updatingof the classical Aristotelian position, but with-out the explicit contemplative or theoreticalbias that attends it. Here is his principal dif-ference from Pieper’s attempted rehabilitationof the Aristotelian position, which focusesprimarily on ‘contemplation’ and ‘aesthetic’creation in the strict sense of the term. ForSuits, we are caught - both really and psycholo-gically - somewhere in between the instrumen-tal and the final, and, not being able to repudi-ate objectively instrumental activities, westrive to make them subjectively final withouttotalizing them. Ultimately this too is an ‘aes-thetic’ ideal, but it is by no means restrictedto art. It is, given the conditions of existence,an ideal, not a reality. Utopia is not realized infact, but in act. It is a formative principle ofaction, not an ever-receding goal of human

20

endeavor. It is present whenever and wherevermeans and ends become inseparable and areexperienced as intrinsically valuable.

Carse, for his part, makes no attempt to ar-rive at a definition though he is offering amodel in the form of a creative metaphoricalprojection. The extraordinary analytical powerand pertinence of his generative distinctionsemerges in the course of their application.Carse relies in his profound meditations onour foreknowledge not so much of games asof the principal human activities that make upthe shapes of our lives. He has no fears, asSuits’s Grasshopper has, that to look on themas games would entail our ‘perishing’ or feel-ing that our lives are fundamentally empty andwithout purpose. That our lives are really con-figured, indeed should be seen, as games isnot a knowledge that kills, but a knowledgethat gives life. As I see it, Carse’s pivotal in-sight is that not only are games finite or infi-nite, but so are the players of games. I think,however, that the best formulation of his in-sight is that one can play finitely or infinitely.This is the existential decision to which hisbook ‘calls’ us. This adverbial form of defini-tion is crucial: it indicates that the distinctiondeals with a mode of existence, a way of be-ing, and not with different persons. Neitherplayers nor games are reified in his approach,which matches Suits’s formal and logical ap-proach with what we can only call a metaphysi-cal approach. The same person is both finiteand infinite player, able, in each instance ofplay, to play finitely or infinitely. It is, in thelast analysis, the ability and the necessity tobe both inside and outside boundaries quitegenerally that Carse wants to explore and toestablish. The ‘seriousness’ of play withinboundaries is matched by the ‘lightness’ andbuoyancy of the infinite player who recognizesboundaries precisely as boundaries and con-sequently lives ‘horizonally’. Inasmuch asCarse is concerned to establish the playful-ness of the serious and the seriousness of theplayful, the seriousness that marks the innerspace of the finite game is to be answered by

our recognition of the non-seriousness, or non-ultimacy, not so much of the finite game itselfas of the finiteness of our playing of the game.

The set of distinctions that run like a spinethroughout Carse’s book are also a permanentcontribution to and transformation of our un-derstanding of the scope of the play conceptand a creative enrichment of our view of our-selves. By means of the dialectical oscillationbetween the finite and infinite dimensionalitiesof the games of life, Carse is able to uncoverthe hidden logic of alternative ways of fram-ing ourselves in, and relating ourselves to, ourinstitutions of political power, property rela-tions, society, sexuality, language, history aslived and as narrated, technology, nature, andtheir various labile embodiments. His ap-proach, which is as stipulative as Suits’s, canbe seen as an attempt to ‘flesh out’ norma-tively the Suitsian skeleton. In these two workswe are asked to take the measure of ourselvesindividually and socially. They offer us a for-mative vocabulary of self-understanding andself-realization and not merely a set of con-ceptual tools.

Notes

1. This is not a merely ‘playful’ reference to oneof the classic works of oriental philosophy. Iam trying to indicate the aphoristic, allusive,life-affirming, and provocative, at times para-doxical, nature of Carse’s literary form.

2. The use of ‘lusory’ and its cognates is Suits’sown terminological choice. The normal formu-lation is ‘ludic’ but I have followed Suits’s ownpractice here and have made no effort to changeit. The meaning, in any case, is the same andmust under no circumstances be connected with‘illusory’.

3. The ‘Diary of a Seducer’ makes up the last sec-tion of the first part ‘either’ of Sören Kierke-gaard’s Either/Or. The work is written not inKierkegaard’s own voice but pretends to be thepapers of two men, one representing the ‘aes-thetic’ point of view on existence, the otherrepresenting the ‘ethical’ point of view. The

Focaal no. 37, 2001: pp. 1000-1000 21

book itself is published pseudonymously un-der the name of ‘Victor Eremita’ who has takenon the responsibility of ‘editing’ the papers of‘A’ in Either and the papers and letters of ‘B’in Or. The preface to that work, Kierkegaardwriting as Eremita, contains the following pas-sage: “The idea of the Seducer is suggested inthe essay on the Immediate-Erotic as well as inthe Shadowgraphs, namely, the idea that theanalogue to Don Juan must be a reflective Se-ducer who comes under the category of the in-teresting, where the question is not about howmany he seduces, but about how he does it”(1978: 9). Here is the direct connection withSuits’s own fiendishly clever argument, whichalso has the indirect literary form that is exem-plified in Kierkegaard’s arch narrative.

4. The reference here is to Eric Berne’s one-timepopular book, Games people play (New York:Grove Press, 1967), which Suits thinks exem-plifies a position of radical instrumentalismwith regard to games. Such a position, accord-ing to Suits, “cannot be put into practice. Be-cause of the equal but irreconcilable demandsof the game and of what may be called life,although it is possible to meet the demands ofthe game or of life or of neither, it is not pos-sible to meet the demands of boty”. Suits fur-ther comments: “If the games played in EricBerne’s Games People Play are really games,then Berne is an exponent of this incoherenttheory. For the players of Bernean games areplaying them only in order to gain what Bernecalls ‘strokes’, a stroke being a unit, so to speak,of social recognition (…). But while an athletegains recognition as the result of performingsome feat, for Berne’s players of games the featperformed is the gaining of recognition. Or inthe language of my theory, the gaining of recog-nition is the prelusory goal of the games thatBerne’s people play” (1978: 148-49).

5. The reference to ‘transcendence’ here indicatesa further ‘dimension’ to Pieper’s analysis thatintroduces religious and metaphysical factorsthat are foreign to Suits’s framework. Pieper’slifelong philosophical project was to establisha ‘space’ beyond utility and ‘work’, where notonly ‘play’ but ‘contemplation’ could takeplace. Contemplation was understood the senseof Aristotle transformed by Aquinas: humanlife culminates not in activities that are orientedto ends outside themselves but in ‘immanent’

action, that is, an action that ‘rests in itself’and is subject to a ‘higher’ logic. The ‘finality’of contemplation lies in itself. One contem-plates in order to contemplate, not becausecontemplation leads to anything else ‘for thesake of which’ it is ‘undergone’. ‘Work’ and‘leisure’ make up for Pieper the fundamentalopposition of human culture. Suits’s project lieswithin the space of Pieper’s ‘leisure’.

6. Carse’s use of the term ‘genius’ is directly con-nected with the notion of ‘self-creation’. Theself is defined by a process of spontaneous‘self-origination’ outside of the causal nexusthat rules ‘the objective world’.

7. Heidegger’s ‘existential analytic of There-be-ing (Dasein)’ rests upon an analysis of timeand temporality wherein the ‘place’ that makesup the ‘there’ of human existence is shown tobe not a substance or a thing but a unified struc-ture of ‘standing out’ toward the past and thefuture ‘in’ the present. Time is for Heideggerthe fundamental horizon of ‘being’ or ‘mean-ing’ within which ‘the world worlds’ and withinwhich we ‘appropriate ourselves’ by ‘cominginto our own’ in achieving an ‘authentic’ ex-istence. This remarkable fusion of Augustine’sanalysis of time and Kierkegaard’s (and Nietz-sche’s) account of authenticity is everywherepresent in Heidegger’s early and more accessi-ble works.

8. Singer’s remarkable ‘meaning in life’ trilogyprojects an ‘ideal of existence’ that fuses theaesthetic and the ethical. It centers on the ‘crea-tion of value’ and the ‘pursuit of love’ and ex-tends and concretizes the types of analysesfound in Suits and Carse, ‘fleshing’ them out,so to speak, by exploring in more detail thevarious ‘lusory’ spaces in which human beingslive out their lives. One of Singer’s major in-spirations is the work of Dewey.

9. This remarkable book is a novel and demand-ing exploration of what in Peircean semioticsis known as the problem of ‘semiotic closure’or ‘unlimited semiosis’. While it may approachat times central themes and procedures of Jacq-ues Derrida’s ‘deconstructionist’ project it cutsan independent, precise, clear, and unsettlingpath through the theme of the ‘inside’ and ‘out-side’ of signs without the mystifications of Der-rida’s procedures. I have undertaken my owninvestigation of this general problem in myConsciousness and the play of signs (1994)

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where I try to establish that the ‘play of signs’is not a ‘free’ play but is bound up with theconditions of embodiment quite generally.

References

Bencivenga, E. 1994. Philosophy in play: Threedialogues. Indianapolis: Hackett PublishingCompany.

Carse, J. 1986. Finite and infinite games: A visionof life as play and possibility. New York: Ballan-tine Books.

Dewey, J. 1958. Art as experience. New York: Put-nam’s, Capricorn.

Gadamer, H.-G. 1986. The relevance of the beau-tiful and other essays. (Translated by NicholasWalker. Edited with an introduction by RobertBernasconi). Cambridge and New York: Cam-bridge University Press.

Innis, R.E. 1983. Dewey’s aesthetic theory and thecritique of technology. Phänomenologische For-schungen, 15: pp. 7-42.

Innis, R.E. 1987. Aesthetic rationality as socialnorm. Phänomenologische Forschungen, 20: pp.69-90.

Innis, R.E. 1994. Consciousness and the play ofsigns. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kupfer, J. 1983. Experience as art. Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.

Pieper, J. 1948. Leisure, the basis of culture. (Trans-lated by Gerald Malsbary. Introduction by RogerScruton, 1998). South Bend, Indiana: St. Augus-tine’s Press.

Sartwell, C. 1995. The art of living: aesthetics ofthe ordinary in the world spiritual traditions.Albany: State University of New York Press.

Shusterman, R. 1992. Pragmatist aesthetics: Liv-ing beauty, rethinking art. Oxford UK and Cam-bridge USA: Blackwell.

Simon, J. 1995. Philosophy of the sign. (Translatedby George Heffernan). Albany: State Universityof New York Press (Originally published as Phi-losophie des Zeichens. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,1989).

Singer, I. 1992. The creation of value. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press (reprint1996).

Singer, I. 1994. The pursuit of love. Baltimore: TheJohns Hopkins University Press (reprint 1995).

Singer, I. 1996. The harmony of nature and spirit.Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Suits, B. 1978. The grasshopper: games, life andutopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (re-print Boston: David Godine, 1990).