To be or, actually, not two sentences to be, that is the question, combined.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Entire fields of human endeavour have been subsumed under the term ‘game’; art in the case of Marcel Duchamp, language in the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, social performance in the case of Pierre Bourdieu. Game structures – recurrent, interactional procedures with semi-predictable results –have appeared in many forms: as methods of communication (inter-species play), as cognitive practices (koans, riddles), as creative procedures (frottage, exquisite corpse), as sensorial titillation (seduction), as a military strategy (game theory), as a form of resistance (culture jamming). Whether referring to spatio-temporally delimited behaviours of specific actants (particles, bees, human beings, inanimate objects), or to complex systems (stock brokering, swarms), game structures are dynamic systems of configuration. They consist of transformation. Within a game structure, every position is an intersection of moves related to other positions. This means that each new move – intended or incidental – creates new configurations that affect all constituent elements.
There is a long tradition of employing game structures to change the way we perceive the world in spatio-temporal, formational and interactional terms. Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-1923) is a residue of language games, jokes and chance operations. Salvador Dalí’s paranoid-critical method relies on the obsession of paranoia to interpret and ‘reassemble’ everyday life. John Cage’s use of I-Ching reconfigures the sequence and circumference of sensorial perception, as do Luigi Nono’s, Iannis Xenakis’s, and Agostino di Scipio’s musical strategies that encompass complex ecosystems. Karl Martin Holzhauser, Gottfried Jäger and Walter Steffens have used physical laws – gravity, motion, thermodynamics – to create musical-graphic works. The Fluxus artists have cast existing games – football, chess, table tennis – in the role of dramaturgical ready-mades thus re-conceptualising social relations. In literature, Alain Robbe-Grillet and William Burroughs have created dechronological novels through the use of mathematical games, translated into narremes. Jorge Borges’s multiply coded and self-referential texts have, for their part, acted as a hall of mirrors where author, character, setting, culture, and epoch reflect (on) each another in a ludic way. Philosopher Peter Stuber invented a game Nomic whose primary activity is the continual alteration of existing rules. Much conceptual art (e.g. Joseph Kosuth’s, Bruce Nauman’s) has derived from mathematical and/or linguistic iteration, which relies on recursive loops.
But game structures have also been used in epistemological lineages. A case in point is Per Bak’s theory of self-organising criticality (SOC), which combines constitutive materialism with holism in a twist-in-the-tale manner. SOC has been ‘dramaturgically reconfigured’ by Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoietic systems (APS) in which internal regulation of mechanisms and programmes (present in SOC) is replaced by self-production. In similar vein, albeit in very different fields of endeavour, George Bataille (1967), Slavoj Žižek (2006) and Byung-Chul Han (2015) have all engaged with the game structures of social and libidinal economies. Relying on the intricate networks of implicit and explicit rules, Bataille’s theory of general economy mobilised Mauss’ s notion of the gift as a dynamic social force. A gift cannot be reciprocated with the same gift, nor can it be reciprocated with a gift of lesser value, which is why gift giving introduces a stake-raising element into social relations. Likewise, Žižek’s analyses of postmodern ideology have relied on the dramaturgy of explicit/implicit moves and countermoves. Byung-Chul Han has similarly theorised the current cultural condition as that of shanzhai. Originally meaning ‘mountain village’ shanzhai refers to the widespread Chinese practice of imitation and reconfiguration of brands, advertising strategies and cultural practices. Not only do these seemingly endless variations resemble Dadaist games, they introduce new recombinant strategies where notions of ‘originals’ and ‘copies’, ‘ownership’ and ‘piracy’ have no currency.
The recent years have seen ceaseless irruptions of economic, political, meteorological, demographic, biological, and psychological disorder. However, they have also seen the rise of new semantic, cultural and environmental systems. Examples of this can be found in recombinant multi-sports, in fusion music (noise-fugue-R’n’B), in genetic engineering – in particular, in transformational hybrids such as plantimals (plants with animal cells), which, in being altered, alter their environment. The aim of this issue is both polemical and creative. By focusing on the relations between the various elements which make up a game we seek to shift the focus away from ‘endgame’ conceptions of failing social scripts and ecological disasters. Purely goal-orientated notions of games inherent in the current economic Darwinism’s foregrounding of game theory as a form of ‘reality-gaming’, is of no interest to us either. Instead, we aim to explore the bio-social, political, cultural, aesthetic and environmental contexts in which game structures cross-pollinate to create transformational epistemological, social and phenomenological matrixes. FOR MORE INFORMATION AND SUBMISSION GUIDELINES PLEASE VISIT: http://www.performance-research.org/editorial-callsforsubmissions.php