Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/ES Cyberama/Baudrillard Online

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Although the value of Baudrillard's notion of a radical form of
play, the cultural force of images without clear reference to the
"real" world, has been debated for many years, few scholars of
play have considered its implications for their own study. This
neglect is regrettable, if only because the trope of "play" is so
central to Baudrillards own work, as well as that of many modern
writers. Play, in some sense, seems central to the modern
experience. A case in point is Internet, the developing
international network of computing linkages. An empirical
instance of computer-mediated discourses which establish cultures
online is adduced to show how it instantiates and extends the idea
of play beyond virtuality to everyday lived experience. Some
conclusions are drawn which point to further research along these
lines.




                        Virtual Play:
                     Baudrillard Online


Classic definitions of play such as Huizinga's (1955) tend to make
assumptions about it that formerly seemed more obvious, but now
perhaps is less so:  that play is to be distinguished by its
quality of pretense measured against what may intuitively be taken
to be real (Huizinga, 1955: ch. 1). In the classic definition of
play reality is generally thought to represent a primal, pre-
cultural characteristic of personal experience. This folk notion
of personal experience suffices in many circumstances to orient
ourselves toward the world in which we mostly live, and in turn
makes us aware, by contrast, of our playful and merely temporary
departure from that realm.

Yet I would like to show in this paper that neither reality nor
pretense is as simple as it has once seemed. In the process I will
argue that our definition of what it means to experience the real
world directly and intuitively must be adjusted and perhaps even
disprivileged against our understanding of what constitutes
pretense, and hence play. In fact I will try to sustain a rather
radical premise:  in modernity, our experience of the real is
primarily playful. Whether we wish to acknowledge it, we are now
immersed in play throughout our daily lives.

The empirical ground for my position arises from my ethnographic
work with the virtual events, relationships, and cultures
encountered through computer mediated discourses; the theoretical
basis, from the apodicta of a postmodern guru, Jean Baudrillard. I
shall first tell a story and ask some questions about its
significance. I shall then sketch an interpretive approach which
emphasizes the insights of Baudrillard, and I shall apply his
thought to the immediate empirical problem. Gradually, I shall
expand the empirical issues, and the Baudrillardian perspective,
well beyond the limits of the initial tale. Finally, I shall
return to the more general issue of reality and pretense within
the perspective of play, and I shall argue for a comprehensive
reformulation of the notion of play in the modern situation, and
by the same token, for a new understanding of modernity as play.

                The Tale of the Seal Hunter

The Internet is a loose, decentered network of mainframes and
personal computers that sustains global connections among its
users, estimated now in the hundreds of thousands, and increasing
rapidly (Kehoe, 1993). The most simple and obvious of these
connections is electronic mail, with which most will be familiar.
Other, slightly more complex connections include listserved
electronic conferences and newsgroups. In addition, the Internet
affords access to many online services such as library catalogs,
databases of scientific, literary, economic, legal, and political
information, interactive role-playing games and other leisure
pursuits, and more than a million shareware files on every
imaginable subject. For purposes of this paper, however, I will
consider only electronic conferences and newsgroups.

Electronic conferences and newsgroups are organized in the first
instance by a formal focus on particular topics widely ranging
from the "frivolous" (such as alien visitors, Eric Clapton, and
odd sexual antics) to the "serious" (such as the philosophy of
communication, the esoterica of dental fillings, and the
mathematics of fractals). A second level of organization arises
from the developing social conventions, or netiquette, of online
discourse (Aycock and Buchignani, 1993). Despite such
organizational parameters, Internet discourse is routinely off-
topic, repetitive, inane, or obscene. It is not too much to say
that an ethic and an aesthetic of anarchy, disparate voices raised
in electronic cacophony, often prevails. In a sense, this
centrifugal character of online discourse lends itself especially
well to intimations of playfulness and provides a useful starting-
point for my investigations.

Early one morning in my peregrinations through cyberspace, my
attention was caught by the following story, quoted on a European
listserved electronic discussion group, CHESS-L:

"ESKIMO SEAL HUNTER BEATS TOP RUSSIAN CHESS CHAMPS!"
    [photo of Uki Derzhal with some sort of sled]


                "By Kevin K. Creed
                Correspondant" [sic]

"A seal-hunting Eskimo rocked the chess world when he soundly
defeated three Russian Grand Masters in fewer than 10 moves!"

"Uki Derzhal, 57, had never even seen a chessboard until a group
of Russian scientists came to his desolate wilderness home near
Mackenzie Bay in northern Canada to study weather conditions and
hired him as a guide."

"The researchers taught Uki the moves and were astounded to
discover that he had an incredible talent for the game. They
brought Uki back to Russia and matched him with some world class
players."

"His first game was with International Master Anatoly Pasternak,
one of the highest ranked players in the world. After a mere six
moves, Pasternak realized he was crushed. He resigned on the tenth
move."

"'It's hard for the non-chess playing public to understand how
exceptional this man is,' Pasternak told reporters." "'He's not
just great. He's the eighth wonder of the world. Masters of this
game simply do not lose games in 10 moves. We all know all the
basic openings and how to counter them. But this man plays
openings and uses concepts none of us have ever seen before. He's
a completely original phenomenon.'"

"Grand Master Hugo Karmetzky, high-ranking player and noted author
of several best-selling books on the game, played the Eskimo and
lost in nine moves."

"'His moves are so powerful and aggressive it's frightening. He
pounces on you with all four feet. No finesse. No frills. I felt
like a boxer in the ring with a polar bear.'"

"The scientists who found Uki have no idea where his uncanny
ability comes from. It was a mere stroke of luck that led to the
discovery."

"'We're all pretty good chess players,' says Boris Valshinka, one
of the researchers."

"'So we brought a chess set to pass the long winter nights. One
night, just for something to do, we decided to teach Uki to
play.'"

"'To our amazement he began trouncing us from the very start. I
know we've made a real discovery with this man. I feel honored
just to have played a part in it.'"

"But Josef Malinskar, the third Master to play Derzhal and lose in
10 moves, doesn't share Valshinka's enthusiasm."

"'Chess is a gentleman's game,' says Malinskar."

"'It's associated with sophistication and decorum and meant to be
played by two refined men in a civilized manner. This person is
nothing but a crude savage.'"


The responses that were posted to this discussion group over the
next week were quite varied. Broadly speaking, these responses
fell into three groups, on a scale of credulity from greatest to
least:  those who believed, those who questioned, and those who
scoffed.

The believers, not too surprisingly, were in the minority:  one or
two posters confessed themselves to be novices at the game and
asked whether such a thing were possible; another poster claimed
to have heard that the world champion, Kasparov, was preparing to
confront the seal hunter; yet another was astonished because he
said that he himself had played one of the masters, Pasternak, and
could not conceive how such a strong player could be defeated so
easily.

Those who questioned formed a slightly larger group:  one poster
checked the FIDE rating list (which comprises 11,000 of the
strongest chess players throughout the world)  and pointed out
that none of the three putative masters was named there; another,
who had spent many years in the former Soviet Union, suggested
that it was unlikely that he would be unfamiliar with any of the
masters' names or with the "several books" written by Karmetzky;
several posters demanded to see the moves of the games; and an
even larger number suggested that the tabloid _Weekly World News_
from which the incident was quoted might not be the most reliable
source of chess information.

Those who scoffed, the largest group, usually did so by
indirection:  one poster made up his own satirical story featuring
a simultaneous exhibition played by Uki the seal hunter; another
inquired ironically whether Bobby Fischer (who had just completed
a much-discussed and controversial rematch with his 70s nemesis,
Boris Spassky) would be playing Uki next; a third remarked that
this obviously resolved the lengthy parallel discussion on this
group respecting the ultimate solubility of chess; a fourth
(drawing on a well-known science fictional chess story, Aycock,
1992: ch. 3) told of the mystic properties of Uki's play that
drove all who observed him insane; and a number of players cited
comparable apocrypha about former world champions such as Lasker,
Alekhine, and Capablanca who had played unknown opponents with
amusing results.

In the end, Uki, his vanquished (and mysteriously "always already"
vanished) opponents, and the (never produced) scores of their
alleged games lost the attention of the posters to CHESS-L, and
they accordingly shifted to other topics of greater interest to
them.

As innocuous as this incident may seem, it still merits the asking
of some serious questions. First, what domain -- reality or
pretense -- does Uki the seal hunter inhabit?  Second, is the
reality of the posters to this electronic discussion group more
substantial than that of Uki?  Third, should we, as we suppose
ourselves to be comfortably situated in local frames of pretense
and reality, become believers, questioners, or scoffers in our
turn?  Fourth, in modernity is play indeed only a mirror, somewhat
inferior, derivative, and secondary, of the real, or has play now
become reality's successor, a virtual phantom invested with its
own continuity and essential being?  Where indeed may we speak of
play in regard to each of these "serious" questions?  For a
provisional perspective on these issues, I turn to the work of
Jean Baudrillard.


                Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard, termed not wholly unjustly by one of his
detractors "the Walt Disney of metaphysics" (Kellner, 1989: 179),
has come to occupy center stage in many debates about the
realities and pretenses of modernity. His provocative writing
style would make it in any case hard to take him literally (Gane,
1991a: 130-131; Gane, 1991b: 4), but we should nevertheless
consider what he has to say, in a figurative sense, about the
images that occupy our lives, and that lend them perhaps to the
autonomous movement of those images without obvious reference to
the "real" world, the world of our personal experience
(Baudrillard, 1981: 185).

Baudrillard believes that a substantive break has occurred between
the classical forms of capitalism analyzed by Marx and the
development of capitalism since the Second World War (Baudrillard,
1981: ch. 6). This breach, he argues, is not only economic and
political, but cultural as well (Baudrillard, 1983: 33). While
earlier forms of capitalism fostered an ethic of production, its
latter mode reveals itself in a no less rigorous aesthetic of
daily consumption (Baudrillard, 1975: 33-41; Featherstone, 1991:
ch. 5). Consumption, for Baudrillard, has assumed the guises of
creativity and fulfillment (or by contrast vacuity and alienation)
formerly ascribed only to labor (Baudrillard, 1988: 21). In so
doing, consumption has exposed a significant tendency of
modernity:  the circulation of images as true value (Baudrillard,
1988: 11).

In Baudrillard's thought personal reality has become subordinated
to a ceaseless movement of codes of consumption which can never be
satisfied, yet nevertheless generate a lack, an endless desire to
confront and possess the real where there can only ever be access
to an image of the real, its pretense of being (Baudrillard, 1988:
45). As images shift and dissemble among themselves, they pursue
their own strategies which displace ordinary human agency (Frank,
1992: 96). Consumers of these signs must constantly reposition
their sense of self in an arena of instability and quest for
satiation; yet always there are more images to be consumed and
more desires to be attended to (Baudrillard, 1981: 56). The
consequence, inevitable if it is understood from Baudrillard's
perspective, is that in modernity we do not engage ourselves with
the real, but with the pretense that has everywhere supplanted it
(Baudrillard, 1988: 135).

There is much more that might be said about Baudrillard:  his
style, like that of many others of his ilk, lends itself to
charges of mystification at best, misogyny and racism at worst
(Kellner, 1989: 181-185). Yet his emphasis on the role of play as
a dominant form of production and consumption in modernity leads
me to ask about the way in which our culture has disengaged images
from their obvious reflections in personal experience, and thereby
pretense from reality (Baudrillard, 1983: 11):  is this play?  The
tale of Uki the seal hunter, though situated in a highly
abstracted scene of virtuality, offers an opening to more
searching questions about the reality that it decontextualizes,
and yet revivifies with its imagery of a restless "play" of images
that seek one another for their own, "inhuman" purposes (cf.
Lyotard, 1991:  Introduction).


                        Discussion

So what shall we make of the seal hunter's tale?

First, Uki's textual reality transpires in an electronic mode, the
computerized world of gadgets which function according to their
own mode of signification (Baudrillard, 1981: 32). Whether Uki
appears on the Internet or in the _Weekly World News_, he remains
a stereotype of the primitive who "uses concepts none of us have
ever seen before" (Levi-Strauss, 1966). This notion of an
ancient, innocent, and mysteriously accomplished world that we
have forever relinquished stands in stark contract to the high-
tech environment into which it erupts. We shall get no closer to,
nor more distanced from Uki by careful inquiry, and we perhaps
should not wish to do so:  this is pretense conflated with reality
in its gentlest form, and to seek the secret of its fragility
might only expose its elusive nature as imagery, and our
experience online as the merest fabrication. Herein, warns
Baudrillard, lies his presentiment of the desert of images, where
the acceleration of ideas traverses their surface, but cannot
penetrate their depth, for there is none (Baudrillard, 1989: 6).

Second, shall we instead seize upon the reality of those who post
to the Internet?  After all, their electronic signatures arrive
from somewhere, and are directed towards a conversation, albeit
one without the apparent substance of personal experience, that
congeals itself as real debits to the accounts of those who
subscribe to CHESS-L. Surely, if anywhere, there is truth of a
sort in this bourgeois economy of the Internet (Aycock, 1991).
The reciprocity of ideas committed to electronic text carries with
it at least an address, and a responsibility for the productions
of its meanings, a fundamental project in any culture, virtual or
real (Goffman, 1974: Introduction).

Yet the posters to this group are as evanescent as their messages,
and when harsh blows (or in the Internet jargon, "flames") are
struck, they divert no life chances, they interrupt no career
trajectories that have been, or might yet be intended. Virtual
persons (Baudrillard, 1988: 22), appear as suddenly on the
Internet as they depart, and the stakes of the game of postings
are ephemeral, at most a temporal rejection that lacks the
modalities of demotion or despair. Ukis tale, it is true, lends
a passion ("the eighth wonder of the world . . . powerful and
aggressive") to the cold textuality of the Internet, but that
passion has few if any consequences for the subscribers to this
discussion group, nor for that matter, for Uki. Those who post to
CHESS-L survive another day, despite their immediate textual
triumphs and defeats, to post again apparently without impunity.
Baudrillard again summons the elusive imagery of modernity to
account for its circumstances:  "simulation is . . . the
generation by models of a real without origin or reality:  a
hyperreal" (Baudrillard, 1983: 2).

Third, there is an important notion that must be addressed here.
It is the problem of human suffering that appears to escape
Baudrillard's metaphysics (Kellner, 1989: 140-141). This issue
seems to displace Baudrillards thought as itself trivial in a
modern world of real starvation, torture, and enslavement so
vividly portrayed by the Marx whom Baudrillard has, in the view of
his most persistent critic, frivolously abandoned (Kellner, 1989:
18; but %vide% Bane, 1991a: ch. 6). The problem of human
suffering at first glance divides work from play, text from body,
and reality from pretense in a way that upholds the folk notion of
personal experience and renders Baudrillards playfulness
superficial, even callous. This needs further attention.

Surely we, as embodied persons living in the real world,
experience our own human gestures of reliance and dismissal. In
local contexts, we do suffer of course, and so do others. That is
to say, we (and others) endure the "oppressor's wrong, the proud
man's contumely, the pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay, the
insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the
unworthy takes" or if we do not, rail against them much as did
Hamlet (Act III, Scene 1). Yet, if Baudrillard speaks cogently,
in modernity we stalk a spirit of the imagination, who stalks us
in its turn. Indeed we are condemned no less than the Prince of
Denmark to a poisoned duel of contingencies from which we shall
not emerge alive, let alone unscathed (Baudrillard, 1990a:
144ff.):  "(c)hess is a gentlemans game. . .Its associated with
sophistication and decorum and meant to be played by two refined
men in a civilized manner." This deliberate heightening of the
drama of modernism through my reading of Uki's tale conflates what
is/ought/seems to be so in a resonance of pure play raised to
Geertz' notion of "the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves"
(Geertz, 1973: 448). Life, like chess, is a "gentleman's game,"
and the "crude savage" need not apply.

Thus we adopt the alternative roles of believer, questioner, or
scoffer to our imminent peril:  those who accept unquestioningly
the "really real," those who temporarily distance themselves from
it, and those who reject it in favor of another, more satisfactory
yet not more substantial imagery are alike content with
Baudrillard's "banal" strategy, the supposition that human
consciousness governs the images of modernity (Baudrillard, 1990a:
181; Gane, 1991a: 174). Ultimately such attitudes are defeated by
"fatality," the strategies that images adopt of their own accord
(Baudrillard, 1990a: 181). Describing an encounter with the
fictional (?) Pasternak, searching for authority on the
institutionalized international list of rated players or the
copyright of published works, enquiring after the written moves of
a furtive game, likening a tale to the enfabled doings of world
champions are all alike the stigma of panic or hysteria that
Baudrillard ascribes to engagement with modernity (Baudrillard,
1988: 45; 1992: 26; Kroker and Cook, 1988: Preface). The
mysterious powers of Uki, the savage, the "natural" man whose play
is likened to that of a "polar bear," are overtaken in each of the
three categories of response that I have identified by attempts to
govern the tale through its reduction to "cultural" discourses,
those which defer to the normal standards of civility. Yet in
Baudrillards thought, and in our exemplar of the seal-hunters
tale, each such attempt to discover a firm ground of reality
defers to another %ad infinitum% with only the electronic trace,
the elusive play of virtual discourse, remaining. Again, in
Baudrillard's thought, this is a "banal" strategy doomed to
failure.

Thus, when I looked immediately online that day beyond the tale of
the seal hunter on CHESS-L, I found only the juxtapositions that
ironized his story (cf. Aycock and Buchignani, 1993):  postings on
another discussion group (IPCT-L) which attempted without much
success to define the virtuality against the real, and on yet
another group (DERRIDA-L) directed towards the autobiography of
its signatories, all elapsing and collapsing in simulated textual
images of human embodiment. Many other instances could be cited,
but it is doubtful that online discourse contradicts Baudrillards
position.

Can we do better, instead, by moving away from computer mediated
discourses?  There is the nightly news, which assumes a posture of
the real, saying what is so (Fiske, 1989: ch. 7). Shall we rest
assured, then, with the carefully choreographed "spectacle" of
Desert Storm (Gane, 1991b: 69; Kroker, 1991: ch. 2)?  How about
spinoff news programs which prime vehicles with incendiary devices
to achieve a desired visual impact?  Or "reality" television, at
whose behest a movie contract was signed, and a production company
formed to celebrate the doings of David Koresh and his followers
even before the stand-off in Waco, Texas had been fully
consummated?  Perhaps television, after all, is not the best
ground from which to assail Baudrillard.

Still, our personal experience is immediate and real, isnt it?
Our bodies surely represent an ultimate touchstone of what we take
to be true. Yet there is a problem here as well:  should we trust
even the sentience of our own bodies that we now know to be
infested by self-images that promote anorexia, gynocide, racism,
and the more exotic "isms" of modernity (Foucault, 1979: ch.3;
Caputi, 1987; Lawrence, 1987; Martin, 1987: ch. 7; Watney, 1989;
Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991)?  After we interrogate our own
bodies in a catechism of self-doubt, what is left to us as self-
evidently real?

Pretense, as Baudrillard reminds us, is the ideology of facticity
where facts are themselves forfeited (Baudrillard, 1989: 85; see
also Barthes, 1985: 34-35). Uki's savage victories over civilized
men are, from this viewpoint, merely the stuff of Levi-Strauss'
myths that "think themselves in men's minds" (Levi-Strauss, 1975:
12). As are we, perhaps.

I have saved the fourth question for my conclusion, and I engage
it now.


                        Conclusion

If the three questions that I have asked, and to which I have
sketched answers above, sound a note of disenchantment, that is
precisely the mood in which Baudrillard reigns supreme (Gane,
1991b: ch. 5). Although he is more often treated superficially as
a proponent of a radical idealism which is divorced from reality
and suffering, there is a persistent intonation of Baudrillard's
thought which attempts to associate play with the problem of evil,
the metaphysical context of human suffering (Gane 1991a: ch. 1).
To address the fourth question that I have asked, let us think
once more about play.

When we try to distinguish play from reality, we usually also
formulate a difference between pleasure and the serious, often
taking the former to be a secondary and derived image of the
latter. By contrast, if we were to privilege play over the real,
then we should, apparently, by that distinction privilege the mood
of fun and dispense irresponsibly with the laborious, the everyday
modality of suffering and embodiment in the world. But
Baudrillard does not permit this indulgence:  he argues that
pretense is dominant in modernity, but so is suffering
(Baudrillard, 1990a: 9). Perhaps we have mixed our categories;
perhaps we should reconsider our premises.

I propose the following as starting-points for our consideration
of the role of play in modernity:

1.     In modernity, the play of images is prevalent in mass-
mediated discourses.

2.     The play of images in mass-mediated discourses increasingly
supplements real experience by its simulations, to the extent
that it becomes difficult to distinguish between them. Our
personal experience becomes intertextual, real experience confused
with mass-mediated images.

3.     Our intertextuality responds to the "fatal" strategies of
the consumption of images. These strategies may evade and even
negate personal intervention. As a result, human subjectivity
becomes a task, not a given. Human thoughts and feelings mingle
with the desire induced by images, which indefinitely postpone
fulfillment by sliding to other images, and yet others.

4.     Our subjectivity is therefore that of the play of images
experienced in virtuality. This virtuality is not only the
movement of images in cyberspace, but also the intensification of
the autonomous mobility of images in everyday life, images without
a stable reference to "reality." In effect, virtuality has
become our mode of personal experience in modernity.

Thus the story of Uki, the seal-hunter, is the tale of us all,
mass-mediated textuality and embodied context miscegenated. Play,
in this view, is the promise and the fate of modernity, where the
dominant mode of discourse is simulation (the "hyperreal"), yet
for this reason all the more intensely felt in that domain
(Baudrillard, 1990b: 79).

There are at least four games here according to Baudrillard,
corresponding to each of my questions in its turn. First, the
game of online discourse, which is exactly the experience of
simulation (Baudrillard, 1988: 22; Borgmann, 1992: 161); second,
the game of signatures in cyberspace, the clamor of digital
voices, virtual presences that cannot be resolved by reference to
the real world (Baudrillard, 1983: 103); third, the game of
embodiment, the imagery of suffering and desire that does not
escape the virtual, but seals us inexorably within its fatality
(the "ecstasy of the real," Baudrillard, 1990a: 9); fourth, the
game of the real itself, that is subordinated in modernity to the
play of images, and the consumption of pretense as the dominant
mode of productivity in this latest stage of capitalism
(Baudrillard, 1992: 15). Each of these games is above all a
simulation, a virtual modelling of reality sited in the playful
imagination, the diffusion of pretense across the cyberspace of
modern lives (Baudrillard, 1975: 20; 1983: 103; Benedikt, 1991;
Rheingold, 1991).

Baudrillard speaks once more:  "Caution:  objects in this mirror
may be closer than they appear" (Baudrillard, 1989: 1).





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