Games and Sport in Everyday Life

Dialogues and Narratives of the Self

Robert S. Perinbanayagam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317259374
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

"This is a powerful, richly nuanced, evocative work; a stunning and brilliantly innovative pedagogical intervention. It provides ground zero-the starting place for the next generation of theorists who study the self, narrative theory, and the place of games and sport in everyday life. A stunning accomplishment by one of America's major social theorists." Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Games of many kinds have been played in all cultures throughout human history. This wide-ranging book explores the social and psychological processes involved in the playing of games. One player (or team) seeks to outwit another by undertaking various physical and communicative moves-not unlike conversations. Games have well-formed "narrative" structures, analogous to myths, that are enacted by each participant to give play to his/her self and its attendant emotions. These plays of the self enable each agent to seek adventures and heroic moments. Going beyond the mythmaking and catharsis that may be achieved by individuals, the author shows how games have been devised and played in particular societies and eras as means of promoting specific ideologies of a society, even social ideals such as utopias.

1

Games

The Self in Dialogue and Narrative

Many scholars have worked hard at defining and describing play and games in as specific a manner as possible. In modern times, Johan Huizinga, in a work that is considered a classic, has discussed many specific features of what it is to play a game, focusing particularly on the general concept of play. For him the primary characteristic of play is that it is voluntary. A second characteristic of play is that it is not “ordinary” or “real” life. “It is rather the stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own” (1950: 8). In addition to these two features of play, Huizinga also describes what he calls some “formal characteristics” of play. There is, he notes, the “disinterestedness” of play: “Not being ‘ordinary’ life, it stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites, indeed it tempts the appetitive process.” As such it is an “intermezzo in one’s life, an interlude in our daily lives.” Nevertheless, Huizinga observes, playing as such “adorns life, amplifies it, and is to that extent a necessity, both for the individual—as life function—and for society as by reason of a meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations in short, as a cultural function” (1950: 9).

Roger Caillois finds Huizinga’s approach “too broad and too narrow” at the same time, and proposes an alternative that is more detailed. He distinguishes the playing of games in terms of “whether in the different games under consideration, the role of competition, chance, simulation or vertigo is dominant …” He continues, “I shall call them agôn, alea and mimicry and ilinx respectively … One plays football or billiards or chess (agôn); roulette or a lottery (alea); pirate, Nero or Hamlet (mimicry); or one produces in oneself, by rapid whirling or falling movement, a state of dizziness and disorder (ilinx)” (1961: 12).

While Huizinga’s and Caillois’s studies are exemplary and pioneering attempts to define and describe play, one is still left in the dark about what exactly a game is. In the work of Bernard Suits (1995), however, one comes across a more comprehensive attempt at a definition of games. He writes:

The elements of a game may now be assembled in the following definition: To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs (prelusory goals), using only means permitted by the rules (lusory means), when the rules prohibit the use of more efficient in favor of less efficient means (constitutive rules), and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity (lusory attitude). I also offer the following, only approximately accurate, but more pretty version: Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (1995: 48)

In anthropology, the programmatic essay by J. M. Roberts, M. J. Arth, and R. R. Bush provided a definition of games that many in the field take as a standard one. They argued that a game is “a recreational activity characterized by (1) organized play (2) competition (3) two or more sides (4) criteria for determining the winner (5) agreed upon rules.” They further suggested that games can be classified into those involving physical skill, strategy, and chance, while in some games these may occur together (1959: 557). This again, like Suits’s, is a very parsimonious definition of games. After surveying these approaches to the definition of games and various others, Jasper Juhl gives his own version: “A game is a rule-based formal system with a variable quantified outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player extends effort in order to influence the outcome and the player feels attached to the outcome and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable” (2003: 17).

These various approaches to games, parsimonious and precise as they are, lack the sociological and social psychological dimension of the playing of games. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Stith Bennett, after discussing a variety of games from different cultures, seek to provide this dimension, but they too seem to miss a central point about game playing. They claim:

The play situation, social reality, is not up for negotiation: the actors are absolutely bound to a limited set of actions; play is a social system with no deviance. Given a manageable number of options for action and an ambiguous symbol system, no viewpoint other than the players’ viewpoint is necessary—the social self becomes superfluous and the player can merge with the process of monistic awareness. (1971: 56)

It is impossible to conceive of a human experience—other than a state of comotosity—in which the self becomes “superfluous.” The playing of a game is certainly not a “monistic” undertaking. The selves of the participants are far from absent; they are very much present and face a variety of contingencies. Indeed, games must be considered, to begin with, from the standpoint of the player himself or herself, and when one does that it becomes clear that they are fundamentally processes in which agents interact with each other, conduct dialogues of one sort or another, and present and narrate a self. The playing of games then is not another and merely lusory or disinterested series of acts, but rather acts that human agents undertake, as players or spectators, to achieve cognitive involvement and emotional engagement with the other. The playing of games is, in fact, a conversation, a dialogic activity that systematically involves other agents, a continuation of the other processes of everyday life. It is also a means by which a human agent achieves intercourse with the other by using a range of symbols that is broader than language.

The Dialogic Imperative

The fundamental processes in any human agent’s life are the acts of addressing another to achieve cognitive involvement, emotional engagement, and at times, physical contact and receiving commensurate responses. It is imperative, therefore, that the full implications of such moves are considered in seeking to understand the human predicament. Marx and Engels expressed this clearly. He wrote:

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. (1970: 51, emphasis added)

Human agents are, indubitably, characterized by a capacity for language. To call this an “instinct” or say that it is “innate” and leave it there is really to evade addressing an important aspect of this capacity for language and engage in a simple-minded reductionism. A human agent does not speak a language as such but a particular language such as English or French or Tamil or Swahili that became available to his or her use from his or her social circles. It is not so much that the human animal has language but that he or she uses a particular medium to address others and incorporate them into his or her mind, self, and life and enable the others to do the same that is significant. Language is intrinsically an addressive medium designed to incorporate others into one’s existence—real others or presumptive ones. Human agents are complex social creatures because they have a language, and they have a language because they are complex social creatures. Every linguistic articulation is a social act that enmeshes the speaker in an irrevocable relationship with another and allows him or her and the other at least to begin a process of mutual understanding—presumptive or real—and to create the possibility of emotional engagement. Further, if no one addresses a child early in his or her life in such a way, language will never emerge, and however innate or instinctive it may be, there will be no specimens for linguists to study. Once a language has been learned by interacting with others, a human agent is forever trapped in interactions of one sort or another insofar as the language he or she has learned is by definition a public and addressive instrumentation.

A human being, then, is not a mere linguistic animal but a speaking and listening animal, or an addressing and answering animal who uses such capacities to good purpose, a dialogic being who actively engages the other with a particular language that he or she has mastered. Exchange of talk is not a matter of passing information to each other or undertaking certain formal operations but of engaging the other emotionally and cognitively and constructing the very processes of social existence. While articulate speech is the most common form of such processes of address and answer, they can be undertaken also by other means—for example, with “sign language.” Such cycles of addresses and answers are the essential and ubiquitous feature of the everyday life of the human agents. They define their being and presence in the world. The selves of such agents—their sense of who they are and what they are—are constituted by ongoing sequences of addresses and responses enabling them to participate in a drama of the self as well as a narrative of the self. And such addresses can be undertaken and responses elicited without using words as such, but tokens thereof. The imperative to talk and enmesh oneself with others, cognitively and emotionally, is so strong that human agents will use a variety of instrumentations to fulfill it.

Conversations and the Self

The moves that an agent makes in the conversation are best described as “social acts” in G. H. Mead’s sense of the term. Seeking to develop a social theory of mind and self, he used the concept of the “social act” as the central one in his work. In one form or another, it appears throughout his work, and it became a fundamental element in both his philosophical and social psychological writings. Ethics and morality, conduct and communication, thinking and the social construction of a unique human agent were all addressed through the processes of social action (1938).

Mead gives the following initial description of a social act and then, interestingly enough, uses the notion of a game to illustrate his point. Mead observes:

In the human organism, the pattern of the whole social act is in some sense initiated in the individual as the pattern of his act. The mechanism of this is the effect which the gesture of the organism has upon itself that is analogous to the effect which it has upon the other …

The pattern of such a social act in the organism of an individual may be illustrated in a game, in which the gesture of the organism is the stimulus to other players to their appropriate responses. Illustrations may be found in any cooperative process in which each individual indicates by his gestures which belongs to his act what the others have to do. (1938: 446–47)

The ruling concept in the entirety of Mead’s work on mind, self, and society is “conversation” as an empirical process and as metaphor. To begin with, he spoke of “the conversation in gestures.” Conversations that cannot be translated into articulate speech may be carried on, he observed, and noted, “we are reading the conduct of other people when, perhaps, they are not aware of it. There is something that reveals to us what the purpose is—just the glance of the eye, the attitude of the body which leads to the response” (1934: 14).

From this conversation conducted by nonverbal means, Mead leads to the discussion of what he terms the “vocal gesture.” It is through the use of these “vocal gestures” or language that meaning emerges. This claim occurs in many places in his writing, but I will give one citation here:

Meaning arises and lies within the field of the relationship between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture … The response of one organism to the gesture of another in any given social act is the meaning of that gesture … (1934: 75, 78)

The social act to which Mead alludes here is really a conversational process: the gesture is addressed to another and it elicits a response. In discussing the emergence of the human agent as a self, Mead ranks the conversational process as the critical one:

The self … arises when the conversation of gesture is taken over into the conduct of the individual form. When this conversation of gestures can be taken over into the individual’s conduct so that attitude of the other forms can affect the organism, and the organism can reply with its corresponding gesture and thus arouse the attitude of the other in its own process, then a self arises. (Mead, 1934: 167)

In such conversations for Mead, the fundamental process is the need for the human agent to understand and empathize with all the others involved in them. Again, using the game analogy, he notes that in playing a game, an agent:

must know what everyone is going to do in order to carry out his own play. He has to take all of these roles. They do not have to be present in consciousness at the same time, but at some moments he has to have three or four individuals present in his own attitude, such as the one who is going to throw the ball, the one who is going to catch it, and so on. (1934: 151)

Meaning and self emerge out of these basic processes in which the gesture of one organism, made after due consideration of the role of the other, elicits the same or similar response from the other, who also undertakes a reciprocal consideration of the role of the initial articulator. The basic processes in a human life are the construction of social acts in which each participant engages the other cognitively and emotionally by taking the role and attitude of the other. Even private cognitive processes are conceived as such conversations by Mead:

Thinking or intellectual process—the internalization and inner dramatization, by the individual, of the external conversation of significant gestures which constitutes this chief mode of interaction with other individuals belonging to the same society—is the earliest experiential phase in the genesis and development of the self. (1934: 173, emphasis added)

In undertaking seemingly solitary tasks, individuals are yet participating in social forms of life. They engage in reflexive activities in which they are able to address their own selves and respond to them, explicitly or implicitly, using a shared language and, indeed, playing a dialogic game. In Mead’s words: “It is by means of reflexiveness—the turning back of the experience of the individual upon himself—that the whole social process is brought into the experience of the individual …” (1934: 134).

From these processes of taking the role of the other and constructing a social act in which one is expected to incorporate the attitude of other into the act, a self arises and becomes an essential element in all conduct. Selves should not be viewed as immanent structures hidden in the head that mysteriously influence the conduct of an individual. Mead argued, “… The essence of the self … is cognitive: it lies in the internalized conversation of gestures which constitute thinking, or in terms of which thought or reflection proceeds” (1934: 173). However, such cognitive processing of the self proceeds to treat it as an “object.” The self has the characteristic that is an object to itself and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body” (1934: 136). Such a capacity for objectification of self enables an agent to engage in what Mead calls “delayed reaction.” He puts it this way: “Delayed reaction is necessary to intelligent conduct. The organization, implicit testing and final selection by the individual of his overt responses or reactions to the social situations which confront him and which present him with the problem of adjustment would be impossible if his overt responses or reactions could not be delayed” (1934: 99).

In engaging in this delayed reaction as well as action, the agent is, in fact, considering the final selection of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Games: The Self in Dialogue and Narrative
• Chapter 2 The Structures of Games
• Chapter 3 The Self at Play: The Self in Time, Place, and Position
• Chapter 4 The Morality of Games
• Chapter 5 Toward a Heroic Life
• Chapter 6 Reflexive Catharsis
• Chapter 7 Gaming Ideologies and Playing Utopias
• References
• Index
• About the Author