A few excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project on games:
On gambling; the less a man is imprisoned in the bonds of fate, the less he is determined by what lies nearest at hand. [014,3]
The ideal of the shock-engendered experience <Erlebnis> is the catastrophe. This becomes very clear in gambling; by constantly raising the stakes, in hopes of getting back what is lost, the gambler steers toward absolute ruin. [014,4]
Benjamin relied heavily on surrealist games for his concept of the “dialectical image,” and I shall post something coherent about that soon (maybe tomorrow), though not without sharing this humorous excerpt from Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Peret, Louis Aragon, etc playing the The Truth Game:
Technically, the surrealists never published any version of the Truth Game in their magazines or books. As Phillipe Audouin noted, the game wasn’t strictly ‘surrealist’, even though the surrealists played it constantly. The game “caused too many disagreements that were already too severe for anyone to consider worsening them by making them public,” Audouin said, adding that there was “a quasi-ritualistic stripping of those present, an ordeal to the symbolic death, and apparently, Levi-Strauss—several times called upon to participate in this awesome game — regarded it (according to Andre Breton) as equivalent to an initiation rite.” This sounds quite similar to the rituals that Georges Bataille would soon develop in the headless leadership and the events that occurred in the forest where the tree that had been struck by lightning waited for its secret society. Nevertheless, I include this next round of the truth game because it reads like a large cafe-scene of truth 0r dare, where the only dare is to answer honestly. . . even if the dare included be completely naked in an apartment elsewhere, a scene I leave to your imaginations.
Speaking of style as a means of expressing from within the given body, the brilliant Jeff Dolven noted that “a side effect of versatility, and sometimes of appetite, is caricatures, holding the other constant in order to be sure of escaping from yourself.” Consistency may be the “great lie of style,” the “constitutive . . . lie style always tells against the contradictions of desire.”
The contradictions of desire are always present in art; style has to be part of how that contradiction is expressed. I thought of a friend’s current project while reading Frank O’Hara’s “My Recess Self,” a poem that reveals the tension between asserting self-likeness and holding on to self-identity, which is lost. Identity is the slipperiest fish, perhaps because its performance is difficult to separate from the social games in which humans participate.
“A good game is one you can win,” Jeff Dolven quipped — but I beg to differ. A good game might be one for which the desire to win is replaced by love for the game as a reason for playing. (And one could argue about different modes of pleasure, comparing, for example, the pleasure of winning —which is a pleasure closely bound to identity, or how we see ourselves as seen by others— to the pleasure of getting lost in the playing of the game— a state bordering on the ecstasy of dancing in a crowd, where what we love and enjoy is that feeling of embodiment without the commitment and boundedness of identity.
Disco makes us feel free-ish, to paraphrase Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” (and to thank Nate Holdren and Jeff Melnick for leading me to it, and giving me a way to think about love of dancing). Embodiment is precisely what late capitalism refuses to grant us. In our perpetual alienation from the body, as socialized by market cultures that cultivate excessive self-consciousness and hyper-awareness of comparison, there are few opportunities for ecstasy in groups. College football, soccer, baseball, Olympics— the public events that provide opportunities for unbounded pleasure or ‘getting lost’ are not erotic. They are simply competitive and we celebrate the thrill of being on the winning side. But what do we feel, physically, in our bodies, when the desired team wins?
Dancing in a crowd isn’t competitive: there is no winner, no win, no game apart from the playing. Maybe there is a way to speak about style that narrows in on the particular shape that our love for the game (or our en-gamement) takes when we play it?
How to explain the affinity one feels when reading O’Hara’s “My Recess Self”? Part of it— the part that has little to do with the particulars of the “I” making such a claim— would be O’Hara’s style, or the way in which playfulness drives his turns and ripples through his syntax. He flirts, which is to say, he makes us feel that something relational is at stake in the unfolding of the poem. He calls us into that charged space where secrets get overheard or accidentally spoken, and that energy develops tension from his use of grandiose rhetorical gestures alongside the sheepish grin of his self-effacements. And yet, there are no “dialectical images” that looms through O’Hara’s poems, partly because the self-mockery (or that particular game of impersonation that he plays in both life and on paper) is, itself, dialectical.
I’m not sure how to phrase what I’m thinking. . . so I am leaving this note to myself and to the void in case words alight on the seat of my brain’s bicycle seat the way bees buttered the seat in Meret Oppenheim’s found object.
The Truth Game is excerpted from A Book of Surrealist Games published by Shambhala Press.