Alan Aycock

Department of Anthropology
University of Lethbridge
aycock@hg.uleth.ca

 

Jacques Derrida is a notably “playful” scholar, in two senses of the term. First, his writing style is playful, richly replete with the puns, circumambulations, excurses, hesitations, and gnomic recursions that make him a bane to his translators and a delight to his readers. Second, Derrida’s playful style reflects his argument that the Western metaphysics of presence may be deconstructed (as indeed, he believes that it “always already” is) by exposing the playfulness of differance, the constant motion of forces elsewhere in space and time.

 

From this point of view I find it somewhat ironic that despite the extensive use of Derrida’s ideas in numerous scholarly fields, no one has addressed the implications of deconstruction for the study of play itself.¹ To remedy this apparent oversight, I shall first present a brief discussion of Derrida’s treatment of the fort-da game described by Freud, and draw out several nuances of Derrida’s approach to this game which seem to me to be more generally applicable to play. I shall then offer five examples of the playing of chess, ethnographic situations that are familiar to me from many years of participant observation and writing about the game (Aycock, n.d.[c]). In each instance, I shall show how my characterization of Derrida’s approach illuminates the understanding of the play at hand. Finally, I shall evaluate, tentatively, the prospects and implications of a deconstructive approach to play, and suggest some directions for further research in this area.

 

Fort-da

 

The game of “fort-da” was invented by Freud’s grandson, who was then one and a half years old (1955: 14-17). In the simplest form of this play, the child had a piece of string attached to a wooden spool which he threw from him, murmuring “o-o-o-o,” then pulled back, saying “da.” Freud (and the child’s mother) interpreted the first sound as the child’s version of “fort” (“gone away”), the second as the German for “there” (as in English “there it is!”). Freud associated this game with the child’s attempt to assert mastery in play to compensate for an emotionally fraught situation where he had no control, his mother’s occasional excursions from the household without him (1955: 15). Freud also linked the empowerment of this early game with the child’s apparent lack of reaction to his mother’s death several years later (1955, 16, n. 1).

 

In general, Freud was using the fort-da game to illustrate the operations of the economy of pleasure that he had described, and to introduce the notion of the return of the repressed; that is, the neurotic effects of an earlier psychic trauma upon later behavior. As a preliminary to Derrida’s discussion of the game, it may also be noted that he perceives a resonance in Freud’s work here with the broad philosophical doctrine of the “eternal return,” which Nietzsche elaborated lyrically in his Zarathustra (e.g., Nietzsche, 1961: 159-163, 176-180). It is quite possible that Freud, who was familiar with Nietzsche’s work (Freud, 1955: 123-124), also made this connection.

 

Derrida turns this brief anecdote into a playful trope for Freud’s writings (Derrida, 1987a: 257-409), showing first how Freud repeatedly sends away and calls back his central argument on the pleasure principle as he tries to summon evidence to support it, then how Freud himself, as the writer of the play, conceals initially from the reader his genealogical relationship to the child as a convention of scientific writing, deferring his authorship by devolving it impersonally on an unidentified child at play. In “writing” his grandson in this fashion, Freud speculates not only on the psychic economy of pleasure, which must yield in the finest bourgeois terms more than is invested, but on the political economy of his own family, and of his own writing.

 

Derrida gradually extends this convoluted image into an analysis of the incompletion of the game (Freud believed that the only use that the child made of his toys was to “make them gone” [Derrida, 1987a: 311]), of his family (the child’s mother and father are mute and unidentified in this account), of his theory of pleasure (Freud never completely proved its existence to his satisfaction, but he never discarded it entirely, reworking it constantly throughout his life), and finally of the subject himself (Freud’s own death prefigured in that of his daughter). But Derrida is not done with the game, either (Derrida, 1987a: 1-256): he plays on “fort-da” in his love letters (whose messages go and return), in the pleasure of his love (which threatens to lose and find itself), in the uncertainty of writer and addressee (always incompletely known), and in the fort-da of his own theory of writing (set in eternal motion by the forces of differance).

 

Even this is not enough: Derrida plays upon the common etymology of the “legs” and “legacy” of Freud (Derrida, 1987a: 292), upon Freud’s reference later in the same work to “limping” as a halting fort-da of his legs/legacy of writing (Derrida, 1987a: 406), upon Derrida’s own limp acquired during an illness as a fort-da of his love and his work (Derrida, 1987a: 139, 141, 199), upon van Gogh’s paintings of shoes as a fort-da of “step/nothing” (both from the French pas) (Derrida, 1987b: 357), upon Socrates-Plato as engaging in an intellectual and erotic fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 222), upon autobiography and the genealogy of ideas as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 62; 1988: 70), upon Freud’s “scene of writing” as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 336), and upon the eternal return/return of the repressed as fort-da (Derrida, 1987a: 303).

 

The play of fort-da, then, occupies much the same analytical space in Derrida’s writings as the play of differance, because it substitutes the centrifugality of uncertainty for the centripetality of the Western quest for a transcendental signified. ² I am highlighting the game of fort-da here not as an opening to Freud’s own economy of pleasure, but as a device to illustrate and gain access to that which I take to represent most clearly Derrida’s approach to the ludic.

 

Several elements of Derrida’s use of fort-da stand out for my purposes. First, the margins of play talk, the “fort-da” of the child, open up to reveal themselves in talk which is not obviously about play: the writings of Freud, of Plato, and of Derrida himself. Second, the authoritative structure of the game exposes itself as always going “somewhere else”: the spool that is thrown away, the rigidly structured scientific writing that is always incomplete, the differance of Derrida’s own circuitous writing style. Third, the players’ subjectivity is always lost: the unidentified child and parents, Freud, Derrida’s unidentified lover(s), Derrida himself, Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche. Thus the differance of fort-da operates not to fix the game as a specific essence, but to defer the full apprehension of the ludic indefinitely, even as it is pleasurably experienced from moment to moment: “In order to think of play in a radical way, perhaps one must think beyond the activity of a subject manipulating objects according to or against the rules” (Derrida, 1988: 69). For Derrida, play is not fixed in finite discourse or structural symmetry or subjective intent: it happens, irresistibly, as a movement elsewhere of the traces of writing in the world (Derrida, 1988: 69).

 

Chess As Fort-da: Five Examples

 

To apply my reading of Derrida’s approach to fort-da, I adduce five examples of different forms of chess: casual play, tournament play, correspondence play, computer play, and skittles. In each case, my narrative is followed by a demonstration of the manner in which talk about play, the structures of play, and the self-awareness of the players themselves lead inexorably elsewhere, into the miscegenations of play that deconstruct its apparent authority.

 

I intend by so doing to interrogate the peripheries of play rather than its core, and thereby suggest that it may be possible to continue the play of signifiers precisely where a more traditional analysis would seek to arrest it. I take this subversion of the authority of these examples of play to represent a paradigm, however tentative and limited, of Derrida’s own playfulness: “this lack, which cannot be determined, localized, situated, arrested inside or outside before the framing, is simultaneously both product and production of the frame” (Derrida, 1987b: 71).

 

Casual Play

 

In the local public library an elderly man and a younger one set up the pieces and begin to play; at the same table, others are doing the same. After a few games, all of which he wins, the younger man proposes that they play with a chess clock (comprising two clock faces set in a single base which operate independently to measure the time taken by each opponent). The older man demurs: “I’ve played chess without a clock for fifty years, and I’m not going to start now. I enjoy chess because I don’t work at it, and to hear that clock ticking takes away all the fun.” The younger man hesitates, then says “ok, no problem; let’s play.” But after one or two more quickly won games he leaves, saying “I’ve got to get home now; thanks for the games.” The other players at the table look up to say goodbye, but continue playing for several more hours.

 

Is there “no problem” here? Everyone has followed the rules of chess, and observed the politesse of social discourse that surrounds it. There’s no dispute; no obvious disagreement about what’s going on here. But there is something which is carefully unthought in the situation, an authority that is rejected, and a presence which is an absence.

 

First, the talk of play. I intercepted the younger man on his way out of the library, and asked him why he had left. As I had suspected he would, he said “Look, there’s just no competition here. I beat the old fart six times before he had even castled. Using a clock might have narrowed the odds a bit, but he wouldn’t do it. So why hang around?” Thus the offer of a timed game expressed covertly a sense of the discrepancy between the two players, and even more fundamentally an expectation that chess is inherently adversarial. Had the younger man said as much, he would have insulted his partner. So he sought an agreement to change the circumstances of play, and was rebuffed. This makes us think, perhaps, about Derrida’s “Bab-el” [1988: 100-104], the translation of disparate terms into covenant, and the fort-da of relationships embedded in discursive situations.

 

Second, the structure of play. The “ticking” of a clock is an image, as the older man pointed out, of discipline and authority in bourgeois society (he had worked for many years as an air traffic controller, constantly harassed by fateful decisions that had to be made instantly). I have spoken at some length with the older man on several occasions. For him, the clock was an enemy: “I hate to be rushed; I’ve had enough of that.” Thus a refusal for the older opponent carried with it an absence, a retirement from work; for the younger, the rejection of the clock was a denial of his presence in modernity, life in the fast lane: “I want to get on with it: just hanging around and playing to be playing is bullshit.”

 

Third, the players. The role of player was perceived quite differently by the two men. The younger man saw the purpose of play as “beating up someone tougher than you; if I had a choice, I’d always play someone rated above me. If you can’t get the rush, why bother at all?” The older man wanted to “enjoy what I’m doing; I don’t care if the other guy is better, as long as he gives me a good game. Rating? Naw, that doesn’t matter.” In other words, the younger man was interested mainly in working himself into an absent hierarchy of competitors ranked above one another, perhaps even in a formal rating system (a four-number designation of strength determined by a mathematical formula [Elo, 1979]), while the older man was engaged by the egalitarian moment of play, its intuited experience. Each of them pointed away from the presence of the game; even the older man had “forgotten” the formal history of chess, which is often recited as a project of triumph of greater over lesser players (cf. Eales, 1985 for an instance of the way in which chess “heroes” insinuate themselves into what is intended as a more impersonal social history).

 

Thus the “traces” of casual play in this example show that it is always on the edge of being transformed into something else, the absent authorial signifiers of formal competition, ranking, and time. The players’ self- consciousness of play moved in and out of phase with one another, and the decorum that required the younger player to stay for an extra two games after his proposal to use a clock was turned down, and to thank the older man for the games that had not really been equally enjoyed by both parties was a marker not of present intention, but of absent transactions, the “unthought” of play discourse that nonetheless dominated its situation. Even the age of the players became a factor absent from the game in terms of the specific way that its rules constitute the play, but present also when the players’ structural position in their life cycles–the retirement of the older player and the immersion of the younger in themes of modernity–is considered.

 

Tournament Play

 

Here a younger man and an older man play in a highly choreographed scene: the room is a small stage raised above an audience of chairs filled to overflowing by players from the same round of this tournament, by spectators who are excitedly pursuing what they take to be consummate competition, and by a few journalists assigned to cover the event. The competitors have a table to themselves, and upon the wall above their play there is a vinyl over-sized board with velcro pieces that adhere to it, moved as the players move, in utter silence, by an attendant. At their side a clock ticks away the time until the time control: 50 moves in two hours (apiece), and 20 moves per hour thereafter. Each player has a printed form at his side upon which he records the moves in a special code, overseen by the tournament director who hovers at the margins of the play, more than a spectator and less than a participant.

 

The younger man has begun the game with a Queen’s pawn opening and the older man, a national champion of some decades earlier, has defended aggressively with a King’s Indian. By the middle game, most of the center pawns are interlocked and the pieces are maneuvering within that framework. At a particular point, the older player pushes a flank pawn unexpectedly and turns the game around: the older man goes on the offense and the younger man has to rearrange his pieces to defend what has suddenly become to seem a vulnerable and overextended position. As the game transpires, the challenger falls back into an enclosed space that he can not sustain. He forfeits a pawn to gain some room to maneuver, but slowly the former champion pushes him into a lost endgame, two Bishops and three Pawns against a Knight, Bishop, and two Pawns. When the older man finally breaks through to a winning position, the audience applauds and the younger man turns over his King in resignation. The players discuss the game in a postmortem with several bystanders who eagerly intrude their suggestions about alternative lines of play.

 

The talk: here rigid silence dominates, other than the audible undercurrent of the clock’s working, but the pieces “speak” for themselves during the game. As a proxy transaction of those who move them, they thrust and counter in a dreamlike counterpoint to the players’ imaginations (in their minds, the players are recapitulating another game, the opening, roughly eighteen moves remembered, of two Grandmasters in a match more than twenty years before). As a kind of deferral of the silent talk that prevailed during the game, the players play out a postmortem in which many divergent lines of play are seized and released (fort-da), each in its turn as it proves more or less workable: “If I move here, then you must . . . .” “But if you do that, then I . . . .” A bystander: “Your King’s-side attack was premature; you had to consolidate on the Queen’s-side first.” Their transactions are always formed in memory, and recalled in afterthought, as what might have been possible. Their game appears afterward in a printed text of the tournament densely annotated with many of the different lines that have been discovered, and will be reincarnated by other players, elsewhere as they challenge latterly this intertext of play.

 

Thus the talk of play exhausts itself along several seams of tournament chess: first as between the silence of the players and the voice of their pieces; second the disciplined quiescence of the room (the tournament director quickly hushes any conversation among the spectators, and the kinds of things that one player can say to another are specifically prescribed, e.g., “Check,” “J’adoube” [the traditional French word “I adjust,” to reposition a piece on its square without being required to move it], “Draw?”) against the tension expressed by the clock that counts down the moves to the time control; third, the relative tumult of the postmortem where numerous previously silent lines of play, many formerly unthought during the game, are then spoken and often are themselves contradicted; fourth, the publication of the play and its annotations against the future replaying of the opening in this game, which is itself a reprise of a past game.

 

The structures: tournament chess is apparently very highly structured. I have described elsewhere (Aycock, 1992[a]) the micro-physics of control that operates during formal play, including the many constraints set upon the motion of competitors in space and time, the segregation and passivity of spectators, the hegemony of the tournament director and the chess organizations that sanction play, even the pairings from round to round (this particular event was a national championship including hundreds of players that lasted ten rounds, and occupied nearly two weeks of the players’ time). But it is also pertinent to observe that any tournament game is only divided by a word, a movement, or a tick of the clock from a dispute that may embroil all present, and many who are absent (for instance, the sponsoring chess organization); in other words, the semblance of systematic respect for the rules of play that suffused my description in this instance is very tenuous, a quarrel carefully “unthought” by the participants (one of whom indeed became intensely involved in such a disagreement during a subsequent round).

 

Similarly, the structure of the play itself, taken as the configuration of pieces and pawns on the board, is always open to surprise, an intimation of structures disrupted. For instance, the King’s Indian opening that was used here is not a monolithic sequence of movements, but a family tree of potential excursions in which the displacement of a single pawn or piece has enormous implications all across the board (cf. Bellin and Ponzetto, 1990). A King’s Indian Averbakh, which was played, is wholly different in tenor from an King’s Indian Sdmisch, and even within the Averbakh there are important variations, each of which may be named according to the Grandmaster who prefers it or the place where it was first played (and often these names have yet further names attached to them to indicate subvariations, or are designated differently by players from other countries). In the instance of tournament play that I have narrated, the older man found a “new” move that he had in fact resurrected from a game that he had played thirty years previously, the venture of a flank pawn which set awry everything in its wake: “I wondered whether you had seen my game against Reshevsky.” “I just didn’t even think about that move; it didn’t seem thematic at all.” Even endgames, which are apparently simple because of the limited material on the board, and have been thoroughly classified (in a five-volume publication of many thousands of pages (Matanovic, 1982-) and analyzed extensively (sometimes by computers), bring the unexpected to bear in particular situations: “I thought if I kept all the pieces on the board, I could create some complications that offered drawing chances.” “I wanted to try losing a tempo (move) in that last position, to see whether I could get the opposition back and save the game.”

 

Thus each move is itself a trace of other opportunities ventured or foregone, and the perception or calculation of moves (which are two very different cognitive operations in human play [Aycock, 1990]) is a complex affair of faults and absences that becomes more problematic, not less so, as the skill of the players increases: “I tried to figure out what was going to happen when I moved the Knight to g5, but it was just too much, so I tried it and prayed.” “I couldn’t decide how you would respond if I pushed that pawn, but it looked right, so I just did it.”

 

Even the postmortem is a wilderness of deviant structures, many that are only discovered during the analysis that follows the game, and many whose impact cannot be assessed, but are marked with a “!?” or “?!” in the published text as possibilities to be pursued in other games. To take the notion of the postmortem one step further, at the highest levels of chess the players have trainers and seconds who study their own games and those of their putative opponents to find weaknesses and strengths that could be exploited in a match. Even in the less exalted national championship from which this game is taken, the strongest players had prepared not only a general repertoire, but also in some cases, for specific opponents who might or might not be paired with them. In other examples that might have been adduced (Aycock, n.d.[a]), the players had met across the board many times previously, and played their present game against a sense of absences, e.g., what their partner had been doing in recent games, how an opponent might react to a new or an old sequence of moves, whether the person involved was likely to be aggressive or conservative at that stage of the tournament. Thus structures of play are always, and have always been, deferred to and from other present situations of play; there is no transcendental signified, no perfect game to arrest the motion of the signifiers that I have discussed, and no abstract competitor against whom one always plays.

 

The players: in a very straightforward way it could be said that the division among competitors, spectators, and officials is exact at any moment of play; tournament rules capture this distinction with great precision (Aycock, 1992[a]). Even when these roles are relaxed during the postmortem everyone still knows who were the “authors” of play in this simple sense, a matter further attested by the results of play that are inscribed on the chart of opponents on the wall at the front of the tournament room, and the names attached to the published text of the game. In fact “serious” chess makes an extended effort, indicated among other things by the recording of moves made by each competitor during play, to identify and fix its origins.

 

Yet from what I have already said about this game it can also be observed that the players were not solely the masters of their own situation. They deferred, for example, the control of the circumstances of play to the tournament director, and beyond him to the organization that he represented, and even further to the rating formula whose advantage they desired (immediately after play, the younger man sat down with a calculator to figure out how many points he had lost; in a closed championship [where most, if not all of the competitors would have been internationally ranked], he would have been trying to sort out what overall score was still required to achieve an international norm). The tension in the room had to do at least in part with the breathless attention of the audience, “players” of sorts who constitute a stereotyped and generalized “Other” of the encounter. The players themselves took into account many absent factors respecting the intentions and self-presence of the players that I have already described: the previous games in which a similar opening was played and the styles of the players who played them, the manuals of middlegame style and of endgame technique, authored by yet other players, that had been studied for many hours each day, the suspicions harbored about the state of mind of the opponent. And as the postmortem dramatically displayed, the players had not intended their play either as a definite conclusion or as a comprehensive understanding of the results of specific moves.

 

Thus, as Derrida has argued, a text of play stands not only for itself but for many other things as well, since there is no one and nothing “outside of the text” who authorizes it of his/her free will. Indeed, there is a sort of Nietzschean flavor to the whole thing, where each player was the hero of his or her own myth, his or her “playing autobiography” (cf. Aycock, n.d.[a]), who lived out the “eternal return” (the endless replaying of a single opening variant, middlegame theme, or endgame arrangement) but who lacked the absolute self-presence to saturate the play: even the world champion loses once in a while, and lesser mortals must obviate their certain knowledge of victory as against the artifice of the tournament, else why play tournaments at all?

 

These traces of play, even in this highly regulated and harshly defined situation (very much a gulag of play, a strict regime of hard labor), express the movement of differance across a field of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980) that is contested and undermined at every point: who understands the play, how will domination be sustained if it can be at all, will the intentions of the players be realized? Always these traces evoke an incomplete presentiment of chess, although the constitutive rules govern the tournament situation just as comprehensively as that of casual chess. “Mastery” here becomes an irony to which everyone subscribes, and that reflects the desire that is summoned by its lack of presence: there is no final answer to any particular game, or to any of its phases, no matter who is involved. All of the answers, as I have demonstrated, are merely vectors to yet more questions.

 

Correspondence Chess

 

Recently when I was cleaning out the bottom of my closet, I came upon a bundle of letters that were written in the 60’s. Among them was my correspondence with a friend from high school, with whom I had played many games of chess over a period of six or seven years. We were quite evenly matched, and continued to play by mail after we left our home town to attend universities in different locales. There is, of course, a formal kind of correspondence play upon which I have reported elsewhere (Aycock, 1989), but here I shall draw attention to a more informal correspondence chess, which nonetheless shares many of the same features.

 

My friend and I played four games at a time, divided equally between White and Black. Unlike the more usual correspondence chess, we imposed no time limit; it was simply understood that a reply would be forthcoming as soon as possible given our heavy schedules of study. The games were inscribed in a code known as “algebraic,” where the chessboard is conceived as a grid of squares, each designated by a letter (horizontally, “a”-“h”) and a number (vertically, 1-8). Thus a move might be expressed as “d6-d7” or a capture as “d6xd7.” The code has the advantage of being unambiguous (for want of a more immediately personal context) by comparison with the descriptive notation that was more conventional in North America at that time.

 

In two of these games we had agreed to begin play from the 11th move of a well-known and highly tactical game, a King’s Gambit played by Boris Spassky against Bobby Fischer; in two others, we had decided to play a strategically more complex opening, the semi-Tarrasch variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined. We had played these games against one another previously across the board as well as in our earlier correspondence, and the honors were about even.

 

In the particular letter that I am looking at, my friend begins with a short discussion of his life on campus and the courses that he is taking, then writes down his moves for each game. He comments on his move in the 2nd game, “well, I don’t know if this is getting me anywhere, but Fischer gave it an exclamation point in Chess Life, so here goes.” Then he pauses in the middle of writing his move in the 3rd game (thus: “h7-. . .”), and says “Excuse me for a little while, I’ve just been asked to play bridge by this guy from downstairs.” The next line continues, “There, that didn’t take very long, did it?” and adds ” . . . h6″). I’ll concentrate on these two passages for purposes of my analysis, which is of course much influenced by my reading of Derrida’s Post Card (1987a: 3-256).

 

First, the play talk is expressed by an interlocking sequence of discourses which include the personal remarks in the letter that have at best an indirect relationship to chess, references to a magazine article on chess and to a play event which interrupts the writing of the letter, and the code itself which speaks the move. The referents of each of these kinds of talk is hard to pin down: for example, I’ve never been to the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina (my friend’s school), I must once have had a copy of the Fischer article, but have it no longer, I’ve never played bridge with the “guy” downstairs, and even the code of the move is hesitant to identify itself without condition, in one case offered with a qualifier (“here goes”) and in the other case broken into in a way that’s impossible to visualize in “real” time (was the piece mystically suspended in the air over the board until my friend returned from his bridge game; was he even using a board and pieces to make his moves?).

 

The letter itself persists in time, though for all I know my friend is dead, since our correspondence has long since ceased. I didn’t throw away the letter, so it may be excavated by mystified archaeologists a thousand years from now if the paper has not decayed or the ink faded beyond recall. The letter also marks out its own space, sketches of a discourse that remains plausible after nearly thirty years, that could be (and perhaps has been) repeated on many occasions. In fact the very principle of the letter is the endless deferral and repetition of its conversations irrespective of our ability to locate it in a specific place and time.

 

Second, the structured authority of the play very readily loses itself upon its margins. These were not rated games, though they repeated rated games that we and others had played, and would play again; it was subject to no disciplinary gaze of a chess organization or tournament director, though we implicitly held certain constitutive rules of chess to be more or less constant, including among others the code in which it was written. Yet there is no constitutive rule of chess that allows the players to begin a game on the 11th move, and it would be a serious offense were players in a tournament to consult a magazine article or any other written text of play, including their own notes. Even the continuous sequence of moves that the constitutive rules of chess requires was interrupted in this writing, and the adversarial assumption that lies behind the play of the game was subverted by the confession of my opponent that he didn’t know whether he was playing a good move.

 

Was this writing of play simply a deferral, an inferior and secondary inscription of the oral authority of the presence of play (cf. Derrida, 1976)? Perhaps in one sense it was, yet writing the play offered quite a different set of textual resources than being there, e.g., stopping to play bridge with a different set of partners, playing four games at once, looking up (as we both did) “best” continuations of the semi-Tarrasch defense in the available chess literature.

 

To take another example of a possible transcendental signified that becomes problematic in the writing, it would be quite hard to locate the origin of our play: where did the Fischer-Spassky game begin (I seem to recall that it was later pointed out in Chess Life that the line advocated by Fischer in his magazine article had been “invented” at least a hundred years before), or the semi-Tarrasch (there was an early twentieth-century Grandmaster named Siegbert Tarrasch, but what on earth is a semi-Tarrasch)?

 

Finally, who were the players? I have already mentioned a couple of candidates for insertion at the margins of our game, such as the Grandmasters to whose names our play was affixed, or the “unthought” spectators of our play who might deliver the letter or dig it up latterly in a rubbish heap. Neither the addressee nor the signatory of the letter is secure, as Derrida has suggested: I have noted that I don’t know when or where my friend is now, but I didn’t then, either, though I accepted the usual conventions that associate the author of the play with the name of the correspondent who signs its written code, the Socrates-Plato matter revisited. And if I have the letter in my possession as I write these words, what does that demonstrate: am I truly reading it now, or was I reading it then, in some definitively authentic way? Is this present account of the play more serious than the original, or less so? Consider even the well-known scam, occasionally used as a plot device in novels or movies, where an amateur player bets on at least one victory in simultaneous games over two famous opponents, and merely transmits the move of the one to the other to win the wager. Can this be ruled out here, or in fact isn’t this very close to what actually happened–wasn’t my friend consulting Fischer to play me, and I to play him? But of course Derrida wants us to continue this argument for orality as well as for literacy, the “arche-writing” of which he speaks [1976: 56]. Thus in terms of the example I have given the uncertain traces of this correspondent play are no more derivative or false than the “spurs” of our personally present play: our intentions respecting the moves of this game and our respective abilities to guarantee its proper sequence were just as loosely connected to our self-consciousness in either event. Indeed, if we had been challenged to supply indubitable evidence of self-consciousness with regard to our play of these transacted moves, we would have had enormous problems doing so without setting ourselves in the flux of differance that is involved as I have indicated in the play of this particular game, let alone chess in general; again, the deferral of the intextuated self elsewhere looms just as Derrida has proposed.

 

Thus even the intimacy of friendship cannot guarantee that their transactions will be more assured of meaning than those of parties who are less well acquainted. In fact, it might be argued that the numerous contexts in which friends encounter one another become the stuff of the deferral of presence even more intensely than for those who have few such contexts, or none at all, since the values involved in any single encounter among friends become multiplied and unevenly focussed on that personal encounter (just as the fort-da incident reported by Freud). This does not lead, either for Derrida or myself, to a claim that the circumstances are meaningless or inscrutable; rather the problem is the reverse, that the meanings are too numerous and too easily scrutinized from every new vantage point to be comfortably situated in an ordinary version of empiricism.

 

Computer Play

 

I am presently playing a chess game with my son by means of an electronic mail system installed on the mainframes of our respective universities. He is not a chess player, or if so, he is only the rawest novice, vaguely aware of the constitutive rules of the game but not much else, and not particularly intent on repairing what to me seems an obvious deficiency. Instead, he refers the moves that I am sending him to a computer program that is also located on the mainframe of the university which he attends, and reports (I suppose, without any real evidence on my part, accurately) whatever the computer decides as his own move in the game.

 

Although we have agreed that I will test my own playing strength against my son’s computer program, he also understands that from time to time I may consult my own chess literature, and even that I might experiment with a chess program, the Chessmaster 2100, that operates on my personal computer. Thus from move to move the parties to the game may shift drastically from organic to silicate opponents. It should also be noted that neither of us is using a chess board and pieces to make our moves, although either of us could instruct our respective programs to print out a simulacrum of the position, and have done so when there was some uncertainty about the transmission of moves and the position at hand.

 

As our game has progressed, our e-mails which indicate the moves to be made have included side commentaries, much as in the correspondence games that I discussed above, not only about the game situation (“this is an English opening, but your program has gravely compromised itself by those silly Bishop moves”), but also about matters related to our jobs (“I’m an assistant operations supervisor now, with my own office, though I get mainly the shitwork”) and domestic circumstances (“are you coming to see us for Christmas?”). In fact, the latter have taken precedence over the game in recent weeks (“I’ve got this project to finish, so I guess I’ve got to earn my money”), and the game has been held in abeyance until more pressing duties are dealt with on both sides.

 

Where is the talk of play, and how is it configured? As in the correspondence games, the play “speaks itself” through our written message, but unlike those games, the writing seems to originate not just with the persons who are individually identifiable in a genealogical sense, but also with a computer discourse that carries with itself its own textual protocol. Being “online” is not merely a convenience which suits two people who are separated in space and time, but in addition a knowledge of procedures summoned from a source far beyond the immediate situation, such as in my case courses taken in “DOS.” Neither my son nor I can simply go to a keyboard and start typing, because both of us must conform to the established arrangements of our university mainframes that permit communication to occur within particular constraints, for example accounts, usernames, and passwords. Especially in terms of computers, the indelibility of the traces which inscribe a conversation is brought into question; if deliberate steps are not taken to “save” the words, the bourgeois gesture of finality, they may be lost forever in a kind of electronic limbo (cf. Heim, 1987: 21-22).

 

Similarly, the game itself endures only for as long as the memories of the mainframe and personal computer can be sustained; if the mainframe crashes, or the hard disk on my personal computer fails, then much of what has been transacted may be lost. Even the attempt to locate this memory within a special physical position, the hardware that underlies the communication, is subjected to the vagaries of telephone lines which transmit bits of information from one city to another. As every computer user knows, there are random glitches in these transmissions which can scramble the signals in progress and render them meaningless: “did you send ’14. d4-d5′?” “No, it was ’14. Ng1-e2′ and then ’15. d4-d5′.” Thus the talk of play in computer chess is mediated by the possibility of garbage introduced by those sitting at the computer keyboard or simply by the chaotic noise of the immediate universe, always threatening to lay waste (“trash”) the representations that are apparently intended.

 

How is computer play structured, and where is that structure brought into question? I have mentioned already that the protocols of computer use offer a structure which cannot guarantee the simple referentiality of the encounter. To give one example, both my son’s and my own mainframe system require users to sign a solemn declaration that they will respect the propertied interests, the copyright of particular authors, and obey the elaborate “Code of Computing” established by our respective universities. In my case, however, I must confess that some of the programs that I run on my personal computer have been “stolen” from their “rightful owners.” In electronic media, the ease of copying one program to another diskette has undermined this bourgeois sense of proprietorial closure (Poster, 1990: 73). From my son’s viewpoint, his conditions of employment, including the use of his university’s mainframe, proscribe its personal enjoyment, or at least accord game playing a very low priority that my son has, I suspect, sometimes circumvented. This resistance to institutional authority, pleasure against hegemony, is implicated in Derrida’s project of the deconstruction of writing, and in this case it is a potential which is readily available in the situation.

 

Our game obeys all of the constitutive rules of chess, and in fact the structure of the programs that we are using guarantees it; the computers will not permit an illegal move. Yet such a simple structuration is routinely dismissed in our play much as my friend and I did in our correspondence games, because we can comment on the play in a fashion that both brings its adversarial nature into question, and that places the play as a tracing of the background of other, more significant projects–our jobs and our families: “I just got an “A” on my combinatorics exam, and by the way, I am playing ‘8. c7-c6’.” We also have the capacity, that has been invoked throughout our game, to retract moves in order to follow a more interesting line of play: “Oh shit, this doesn’t work; let me try again from move 17.” This is not usual even for casual chess, and systematically betrays the notion that a movement of a piece or a pawn has some sort of lasting influence on play arising from personal presence. The lack of a “real” board and pieces underscores this sense of an encounter defined not by its presence, but by its absence in an otherwise identifiably empirical context.

 

The players, of course, are always those who may not be self-referentially present and intending or enjoying their game; I suspect that my son is humoring my peculiar obsession with the game rather than pursuing an activity that he himself values. Sometimes players are at a distance the guarantors of play, for example if I am making my move and writing it to my opponent. But from the other side of the game, the physically human author is a messenger only, even though I could scarcely reject his genealogical connection to me if I wished to do so. When I allow Chessmaster 2100 to reply to my son’s moves, we both become facteurs of the play. Does this mean that the computers are playing? They might be, but I know of no way to find out what they intend, or even if they “desire to win” in the ordinary sense of that phrase. If we don’t mean to say that players desire something, or anything, then what is really meant by a player?

 

In theory we could apply a Turing test (Levy and Newborn, 1991: 31) to the definition of player: “players” are those who transact the motions of the game in such a way that it becomes impossible to distinguish humans from computers. Forget that I, as an experienced player, could very likely distinguish the usual style of a computer’s play from that of a human, and let us consider whether the Turing answer is sufficient to disconcert Derrida’s model of differance. In the first instance, computers do not yet program themselves to play chess, nor do humans; the impetus always arrives from elsewhere, a programmer or a teacher (in the human case, usually a member of an immediate kin group, often a father [Parry and Aycock, 1991]), whose own programmability works in an infinite regression to many other origins, none of them terminable by any test that has been devised. No one spontaneously or self-referentially invents the moves of chess. Second, a Turing paradigm circumvents the intention and the desire of play in a fashion that Derrida would find agreeable. The play just “happens” for the Turing examiner, and that movement of play is both necessary and sufficient to make it real. Whether an embodied subject is the source of that play is left open for question. Finally, the actual play of a game is never fully determined by a Turing argument, because it is always assumed that following the constitutive rules is enough to accomplish the goal of locating “intelligence” that the Turing test addresses. In this situation there is a resonance of the Freudian “fort-da” game that should not be overlooked.

 

Yet actual games, such as the one that my son and I have undertaken, are not only a “black box” where moves go in and come out in a regular sequence. Games of chess have a particular style, even for novices, that is impossible to relegate only to their immediate conformity to its constitutive rules (Parry and Aycock, 1991). The meaning of “style” is not dissimilar in some ways to the medieval notion of “soul,” or to the more modern idea of the “real self,” as it might be transubstantially conceived (Aycock, 1990: 139): there remains a je ne sais quoi about a given game that overflows its authorial boundaries, but that lends to the play a pleasurable experience that is always somewhere else than merely in the recorded list of moves. Chess players have worried at length about the use of computers to contrive an “information death” of the game, but the quintessence of play, as Derrida has argued, resides always already beyond its realization in discourse that is immediately present. The play emerges from an uncertainty which is never encapsulated in its specific traces, but functions to inscribe those traces in the imagining of what might just happen next, or of the significance of what has already transpired. Nor is this a simple mystification of the human potential, because as Derrida has argued the moment of play is always arrested and released in an empirical circumstance.

 

Skittles

 

“Skittles” is a term used in chess to denote a kind of playing at play in which one or more of the standard rules of competitive chess is set aside to intensify the moment of the game (Aycock, 1992[a]). By far the most frequent form of skittles is the use of a chess clock to diminish substantially the time that players may take to make the moves of their game. As the time becomes shorter, players take ever greater risks, and rely upon the quickness of their wits and upon sheer luck to win. Chess is shifted in the process from, ideally, a game of perfect information and calculation to something closer to Derrida’s open-ended universe of traces. The device of that shift is a subversion of the bourgeois economy of the clock.

 

The situation is an empty tournament hall following the completion of the sixth round of a national championship. Since it is several hours past midnight, most of the players have completed their games and gone home. Half a dozen men of all ages and skill levels from strong amateur to titled master cluster around one of the hundred or so chess boards in the hall, playing ten-minute chess, munching on hamburgers and fries, and drinking soft drinks or coffee. As the term “ten-minute chess” suggests, each player has ten minutes for all the moves of the game. The person whose “flag” falls first (a red lever that is pushed erect by the minute hand of each clock, then drops when the hand reaches the vertical) loses irrespective of the material forces or the position then on the board. A common practise, which is followed here, is for one player to take on all comers until he loses, then to be replaced by another player who challenges the winner of that contest; the players take their seats more or less in rotation.

 

Tournament regulations such as strict silence and moving a touched piece are ritualistically reversed: the players freely “kibitz” their own games, while the bystanders join in the often ribald commentary. Touching or even moving a piece is not irreversible until one strikes the button that stops his own clock and starts that of his opponent. As the time limit approaches, the game builds to a frenzy, with players moving wildly, slamming their pieces off-center on the squares and hitting the clock with greater and greater force. Pieces that are captured are tossed aside, sometimes falling off the table to be caught or picked up by one of the bystanders. Even the clock is not exempt from this rough treatment, though chess clocks are relatively more expensive and fragile than the plastic pieces (another infraction of bourgeois norms, this time of commodification).

 

Eventually in this particular situation the most highly ranked and titled player present begins to win consistently. After some badinage (“It must be tough to be perfect” “Yeah, I hear that all the time”), he agrees to reduce his own time by one minute for each game that he wins, balancing the odds out a bit. He does not lose until he is playing with only a single minute against his opponent’s ten. At this point, everyone suddenly realizes that they are exhausted (earlier that evening each of them has played a strenuous tournament game lasting perhaps four to six or more hours), and the group breaks up to retire to their hotel rooms.

 

The play talk in this example is quite different from that each of the others. Unlike casual chess, politeness is deliberately avoided, as players comment rudely on one another’s skill and personal habits, as well as upon their own: “What a patzer!” “C’mon, get serious; I’m not going to fall for that!” “Holy shit, give me a break, huh?” Unlike tournament chess, noise is privileged over silence: “Ouch!” “Fuckin’-A!” “Auugghh!” Unlike correspondence and computer play, the talk is not incidental to the play, but part of its intensity: “What’s the matter; you too good to take my Rook?” “Well, I guess if you’re going to eat up my Queen’s-side, my King’s-side attack had better work; take the damn Bishop sac!” If the pieces speak for themselves, it is to share in the raucous tenor of the occasion, as they add their own clatter to the general turmoil. Thus in skittles more obviously than in the other forms of play that I have described the talk is confused with the action of the players, spreading out the game discourse over a much broader context that includes the braggadocio of the combatants and general colloquialisms of pleasure and disgust as well as the liberation of the ordinarily measured transactions of play. For instance, it’s not at all unusual in this situation for a player who has made a move and “punched” his clock to start making his next move even before his opponent has completed one in his turn; quite often two hands descend on the buttons of the clock simultaneously, sometimes with disastrous results for its mechanism.

 

The structures of the game, by the same token, are distorted to engage the players with the experience of the play rather than simply with its outcome. By contrast with the rigid discipline of the tournament round that was just completed, the skittles games are carnivalesque and have some of the characteristics of that resistant mode (cf. Aycock, n.d.[b]). Here the players have violated the spatial distinction that is normally made between the tournament hall as a kind of “sacred” context of serious play and the analysis room where such “secular” off-hand games are usually contested (Aycock, 1992[a]). The burlesquing of time constraints on play offers a patent contrast with the standard bourgeois economy of tournament time controls. The absence of a director (he was actually one of the participants, but was treated by all as just another player) removes the supervisory gaze of a sponsoring chess organization, though it is noticeable in any event that disputes in skittles are extremely rare. Finally, no one keeps score or computes ratings, so measurements of strength are entirely transient, claiming a sort of civil inattention (Goffman, 1963: 84) to the disparity in formal levels of accomplishment between the strongest and weakest players present.

 

Thus this skittles example represents notionally an “unthought” rejection of the limits or margins of serious play, and as well a complex refusal of the quiet relaxation of casual play (remember the younger man who became disgruntled when his older opponent would not use a clock in the instance of casual play). Skittles can be played without a clock, but most experienced players consider it rather unexciting. At the other end of the spectrum, tournament chess can be played with shorter time limits (for instance, games with an overall time limit of one hour) than those usually imposed by chess organizations, but it is only recently and after much debate that they have begun to be formally recognized as worthy of “serious” attention, such as the calculation of ratings or the award of titles such as the World Speed Chess Champion.

 

The sense of the chess “player” as such is also subtly decentered in skittles of the sort that I am describing, since there are not just two players involved in this example, but half a dozen who participate in the play both directly as they rotate to challenge the winner, and indirectly as they interject their commentary (“kibitzing”) while others actually move the pieces. The clock also becomes a participant of sorts, since it may dictate the result of the game irrespective of the situation on the board: a player whose game is hopelessly lost from a material or positional standpoint will nevertheless continue to move his pieces around (“just thrashing about”), desperately trying to stave off checkmate until his opponent runs out of time and loses “on the clock.”

 

Another critical factor is that the players, however they are to be defined, do not intend or guarantee the text of their play. Instead, players will attempt wildly unsound opening gambits or middlegame sacrifices, knowing that it is virtually impossible to respond to them as systematically as in tournament, or even in casual play. For instance, in one of the games of this sequence a player sacrificed his Queen for a Bishop and Knight in an otherwise relatively quiet position. His opponent stared dumbfounded at the board for a precious two minutes, then panicked and tried to realize his material advantage before his flag dropped. He wound up blundering away yet another piece in a couple of moves, and resigned in good-natured exasperation (not just by turning over his King quietly, but by suddenly gathering the pieces at the center of the board in a sweeping two-handed gesture) when he saw that he had placed his King and Queen in a position to be forked by his opponent’s Knight. The rupture of normal transactions and of the assumption of rationality that lies behind them (Aycock, 1992[a]) is a common feature of the displacement of intentionality in skittles.

 

Again, though players draw upon their skill and knowledge of the game, as in other forms of play, the instant recall of variations and themes that is involved in skittles works against players’ capacities to search thoughtfully for a specific authorization of a given opening or end-game technique that is associated with an ancestral champion of that style; this contrasts sharply with the correspondence and computer play that I have discussed, where chess literature is openly consulted to evoke the “best” line of play. Thus the authorization of play is as radically indeterminate in skittles as in the other instances of play, but for rather different reasons. The “arche-writing” of play amid personal presences, of which skittles appears to be an ultimate exemplar, is not necessarily freer of traces or absences than the “phonetic” writing of correspondent or computer play.

 

Conclusion

 

I have attempted in these five examples of chess to deconstruct what is ordinarily meant by the ludic. As I understand deconstruction (even in the excessively narrow, naove and demotic form that I may have deployed it here), this means that I have proceeded from an assumption that play is evoked not by a simple, measurable presence of speaking, structure, and self-awareness in particular meaningful situations. Rather, the ludic in the instances that I have given seems to trace or inscribe itself upon absences, the force that differs and defers meaning always already somewhere else beyond the immediate ken of the participant observer and of those who are the constructed “Others” of ethnographic analysis. It then becomes much more difficult to ground simple empiricism in the “real,” which reveals itself not simply as a given, but as a central problem and task of study.³

 

First, the talk of play does indeed seem to lose some of its solidity as I explore its role in different forms of chess. The casual players were talking about one thing, and meaning quite another when they debated whether to use a clock, and exchanged farewells at the conclusion of their games. Tournament players speak with their play alone according to the strict rules of competitive chess, but when they do so they are implicitly voicing the potential disruptions of that regime, and aligning themselves with many alternative directions of play that may emerge in their training for a tournament game, or in the postmortem that succeeds it. Correspondence players can, and in the nature of their play, often do defer their coded transactions to the interruptions of present circumstance or to the archaeology of closet dibris. Computers are programmed to speak the play in electronic signals, but they cannot sustain a linear discourse without the complicity of many other figurations that have little directly to do with the game. Even skittles players, the most immediately focussed of all chess participants, interweave their games with a barrage of words that make the game something other than that which is prescribed by its constitution. Time and space, in all five examples, are elements of the “babel” of play that render its meanings untranslatable in the most direct sense and thereby interrupt its covenants.

 

Second, the structures of play surround it and seem to fix its situation in deterministic, readily discernable contexts. But casual players may contest the structure of a game with clocks, and thereby resist unbeknownst to themselves the straightforward exchange of polite formulae of disengagement. Tournament players inhabit a highly structured event, though they may at any moment bring into question its institutionalization by disputes that call to account and sometimes undermine the authority of the director. Although tournament play is symbolically rationalized in numerous ways, those claims on structural authority are always subject to equivocation about the best play, and indeed the point of tournament chess is to overwhelm a particular positional structure by divergence toward unanticipated movements in an opening, middlegame, or endgame. Correspondent play uses writing as a resource rather than as merely a constraint of the relationship between players, and points to a reevaluation of structure (beginning on move 11, or consulting the Fischer article) as a way to play upon intimacy and to vanquish distance (the obtruding bridge player). Computers are physically structured to maintain the play in sequence and along acceptable lines, but they can be deprogrammed, as it were, by random noise, by circumvention of the “codes of conduct” of their authorizing agencies, or by an agreement of the parties to arrangements that were not originally contemplated. Skittles, finally, foreordains its deviance from the structure of the tournament or even of casual play, and encourages a catastrophic occlusion of time, touching, speaking, and rational calculation, all of which are apparently inherent in other forms of competitive chess.

 

Third, the players of chess work not only within the limits of the game, but beyond to express their broader roles which intrude upon its play. In casual play, what the players experience and intend is sometimes concealed and oftimes contradictory, dependent in part upon identities which arise from a position in their life cycle or an attitude toward the fast tempo of modern life. Tournament play expressly segregates authors of the game from its spectators, but relieves that distinction in the postmortem. More importantly, serious competition requires an ongoing relationship of the players with their predecessors and successors, trainers and seconds, and in addition defers their responsibility for the conditions of tournament play to a tournament director who represents an absent player, the organization that attempts, with rather uneven success, to guarantee that its conditions are acknowledged. Correspondents routinely admit their subservience to texts of play that are only tangential to the situation of their games conceived in terms of personal presence, and the literate circumstances of correspondent play divert attention from personal presence to authorizations that are potentially far removed in time and space from the material basis of their transactions, the post card or letter that bears its moves (is the “guy” who wants to play bridge not a player in my chess game with my friend, and if not, how is that to be demonstrated?). Computers confess a range of players whose own biochemistries may be entirely alien from one another, and whose intent or desire is, to say the least, highly problematic. Finally, skittles is an enterprise where players sometimes collude, often diverge, to create the semblance of a game. The relaxation of normal constraints upon authorization in skittles paradoxically invokes new and diffused authorities, the clock, the kibitzers, the sauvage style that skittles players tend to adopt as an intimation of their personal identities.

 

I must now consider whether a deconstructive approach to the study of play, as I have here characterized it, is sufficiently promising to continue work along similar lines. In a sense, there is very little involved in deconstruction that could not be accomplished by careful examination of traditional ethnographic assumptions (Aycock, 1992[b]) about the play, the players, and the role of the observer. Yet one important value of a deconstructive approach is to suggest that a figure-ground reversal of what is normally meant by the ludic and the serious may refocus attention on problems that could otherwise be taken for granted. In particular, it becomes possible to reformulate the instances of play that I have described as specific contexts of a more global problem of authority in Western cultures, ludic, scholarly or otherwise.

 

For example, familiar symbolic oppositions such as “culture-nature” and “order-disorder” take on an entirely new significance if the search for what is “real” is, deja aussi, a point of departure for analysis, because the fort-da of the human sciences is then shown to be at least as uncertain as human experience itself. We should not, from this perspective, be complaisant about adopting a deconstructive approach, but we should be aware that it offers a continuing challenge to more conventional notions. Thus competitive chess is for many in Western culture the ideal image of a “factory of reason” (Aycock, 1992[a]), which may lead a deconstructive analysis to reflect in general upon reason and its limitations.

 

Again, anthropology has invested itself with the Western conception of human knowledge as a progressive narrative that begins, continues, and flourishes interminably in Time (cf. Fabius, 1983). Chess shares with anthropology this sense of the limitless expansion of knowledge, an endeavor made “real” by the experimental attitude of serious competitors towards lines of play that are to be tested, discovered, renewed or discarded, and incorporated into volumes of games studied by each player as part of an autobiography of style (Aycock, n.d.[a]). Yet deconstruction causes us to hesitate in our easy affirmation of this progress. Like Foucault, Derrida works against the comfortable presumption of knowing the play–whether as players or as ethnographers–by relating it also to epistemological problems that are riddled through and through by contending gestures of empowerment and alienation.⁴ If you think about the “King’s Indian” not just as the name of a specific text or pattern of play, but as an image of authority, it suddenly becomes quite clear why a deconstructive approach might be provocative.

 

Finally, there is an aesthetic as well as an ethical dimension involved in deconstruction which might be generalized for those who labor in the human sciences, or indeed in any Lebenswelt where diverse values have become relevant (and where have they not?). There is, obviously, an important ontological debate evoked here, the familiar “is/ought/seems” trichotomy that Derrida particularly seeks to address. Thus, a deconstructive approach conflates the author, reader, and text in rewarding ways: who would have thought, before Derrida, that the variants of chess were meaningful not just as immediate transactions of a game, but also as forces of a cosmic kind of play interwoven by differance amongst a texture of the Western search for authorial presence? Feeling, knowing, and desiring the play, in this sense, cannot be held apart from one another, nor should they be: games are “world-building activities” (Goffman, 1961: 27).

 

The possibility of a coherent deconstructive approach is, of course, something of a contradiction in terms: differance lends itself most readily to pluralism, not singularity. In the very effort to write of a peripatetic style such as Derrida’s in the linear form of an essay, one despairs of closure. It seems to me, nevertheless, that if the conceptual issue is radically undecidable, the practical problem is not. All that I intend here is to suggest that at this moment, for these instances of play, I can offer a simplistic account of Derrida’s thought that seems to go beyond ordinary limits of ethnographic analysis.

 

Thus even the five examples of play related above afford a venue for more sophisticated study. An important direction for further analysis would deconstruct not only the immediate situations of play, but also, more comprehensively, their institutionalization. Another problem that I have glossed over in my analysis is that of mass-mediated play, which deserves a deconstruction all its own. Yet a third issue not dealt with in this essay is the relationships of play to engenderment, race, nationalism, commodification, and the post-colonial milieu of “carceral” society. Fourth, the contrivance of playful biographies is implied, but not directly brought to the fore in my arguments. Finally, a careful tracing of the economies of pleasure associated with these four issues would invoke more directly the Freudian fort-da transaction as it has actually been deployed by Derrida in his work. All of these represent the “unthought” in my discussion, and thereby implicate as yet unspoken, and more thoroughgoing deconstructions.

 

I have tried to show here that when we take the ludic as ludicrous, we have in some ways revealed a credential for analysis rather than only a means, finally, to discredit it. Derrida, typically, steals my last words and makes a game of them: If the alterity of the other is posed, that is only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the “constituted object” or of the “informed product” invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be “posed.” Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is of itself confounded…differance (1981: 95-96).

 

Notes

 

1. The extent to which deconstructive approaches have become entrenched in the human sciences is suggested by this lengthy list of subject headings, taken from a major North American research library, in which “deconstruction” appears as a key word: architecture, education, feminism, film criticism, history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, painting, philosophy, social psychology, sociology, and theology. Surprisingly, anthropology is not included, though one need not distort the “writing culture” debate (e.g., Clifford, 1988; Clifford and Marcus, 1986) too much to perceive a deconstructive intent.

 

2. Think of Derrida in this sense, perhaps, as a master of Japanese “Go” (more evocatively in Chinese, “wei-ch’i,” the “surrounding” game): finely shaped colored stones are moved, insouciantly as if of their own accord, to circumscribe paths of influence that command the empty board without filling it (Korschelt, 1965: ch. III).

 

3. See also Hayles (1990: ch. 7), who perceives a modern alliance of deconstructive trends with another ultra- empiricism, chaos theory.

 

4. Like Swift’s Laputans who carry with them on their backs a bundle of objects so that they can converse by holding forth one after another with no possibility of misconstruction (Swift, 1945: 170-171), Derrida burlesques the comfortable assumption that we know what we are talking about at a particular moment. To extend the satiric image, I suggest that Derrida occupies the role of the servant who walks just behind one of Laputa’s meticulous philosophes with a bladder affixed to a stick, flapping it against his sense organs from time to time to return his attention to the dangers and resources of the “real” world (Swift, 1945: 144-145).

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