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The power in a society is guaranteed and enhanced by the power of a society.
Those who desire the permanence of their prizes will work to sustain the permanence of the whole. Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play.
Because culture as such can have no temporal limits, a culture understands its past not as destiny, but as history, that is, as a narrative that has begun but points always toward the endlessly open.
It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces.
Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been—and therefore of all that we are.
Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished in the past. Societal convention, on the other hand, requires that a completed past be repeated in the future. Society has all the seriousness of immortal necessity; culture resounds with the laughter of unexpected possibility. Society is abstract, culture concrete.
One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society’s property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all. To understand the peculiar dynamic of property we must return to one of the features of finite play.
“The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the preservation of their Property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting” (Locke).
will go about preserving its citizens’ property, we can expect the reply that it will do so by the use of force.
Those who challenge the existing pattern of entitlements in a society do not consider the designated officers of enforcement powerful; they consider them opponents in a struggle that will determine by its outcome who is powerful. One does not win by power; one wins to be powerful. Only
Property must be seen as compensation.
Property must be seen to be consumed.
Property is appropriately compensatory whenever owners can show that what is gained is no more than what was expended in the effort to acquire it. There must be an equivalency between what the owners have given of themselves and what they have received from others by way of their titles.
The intuitive principle here is that we cannot be justified in owning what we do not need to use or plan to use. One does not earn money merely to store it away where it will be protected from all possible future use. Consumption is to be understood as an intentional activity. One does not consume property simply by destroying it—else burning our earned money would suffice—but by using it up in a certain way.
The more powerful we consider persons to be, the less we expect them to do, for their power can come only from that which they have done.
Consumption is an activity so different from gainful labor that it shows itself in the mode of leisure, even indolence.
is the common goal of the rich to establish a mode of visibility that will extend itself over generations by executing wills that prevent the rapid exhaustion of their fortune, by endowing societally important institutions, by erecting great buildings in their name.
Those persons whose victories the society wishes never to forget are given prominent and eternal monuments at the heart of its capital cities, often taking up considerable space, diverting traffic, and standing in the path of casual strollers. It
The deepest and most consequent struggle of each society is therefore not with other societies, but with the culture that exists within itself—the culture that is itself. Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture. Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society’s heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets
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Culture is likely to break out in a society not when its poietai begin to voice a line contrary to that of the society, but when they begin to ignore all lines whatsoever and concern themselves with bringing the audience back into play—not competitive play, but play that affirms itself as play.
What confounds a society is not serious opposition, but the lack of seriousness altogether. Generals can more easily suffer attempts to oppose their warfare with poiesis than attempts to show warfare as poiesis. Art
Once warfare, or any other societal activity, has been taken into the infinite play of poiesis so that it appears to be either comical or pointless (in the way that, say, beauty is pointless), there is an acute danger that the soldiers will find no audience for their prizes, and therefore no reason to fight for them.
The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.
For this reason it can be said that where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.
boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without being resisted. This is why patriotism—that is, the desire to protect the power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society—is inherently belligerent. Since there can be no prizes without a society, no society without opponents, patriots must create enemies before we can require protection from them. Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous. The spirit of patriotism
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Who lives horizonally is never somewhere, but always in passage.
A culture is sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas, its works, even its language. This is a common strategy of a society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries. But it is a strategy certain to fail, because it confuses the creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that activity.
One cannot be free by opposing another. My freedom does not depend on your loss of freedom. On the contrary, since freedom is never freedom from society, but freedom for it, my freedom inherently affirms yours.
For a bounded, metaphysically veiled, and destined society, enemies are necessary, conflict inevitable, and war likely.
To keep its definitions clear a state must stimulate danger to itself. Under the constant danger of war the people of a state are far more attentive and obedient to the finite structures of their society:
War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.
If it is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation.
The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies.
Just as Alexander wept upon learning he had no more enemies to conquer, finite players come to rue their victories unless they see them quickly challenged by new danger. A war fought to end all wars, in the strategy of finite play, only breeds universal warfare.
The strategy of infinite players is horizonal. They do not go to meet putative enemies with power and violence, but with poiesis and vision. They invite them to become a people in passage. Infinite players do not rise to meet arms with arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision, and surprise to engage the state and put its boundaries back into play.
What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are...
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True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets—that is, creators of all sorts—seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.
The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. The words die with the sound.
I can be said to be the result of precise genetic influence. The date and place of my birth are matters of causal necessity; I had no part in deciding either. Neither could anyone else have chosen them. My birth, when understood in terms of causal continuity, marks no absolute beginning. It marks nothing at all except an arbitrary point in an unbroken process.
It is the genius in us who knows that the past is most definitely past, and therefore not forever sealed but forever open to creative reinterpretation.
Not allowing the past to be past may be the primary source for the seriousness of finite players. Inasmuch as finite play always has its audience, it is the audience to whom the finite player intends to be known as winner. The finite player, in other words, must not only have an audience but must have an audience to convince.
As we enter into finite play—not playfully, but seriously—we come before an audience conscious that we bear the antititles of invisibility. We feel the need, therefore, to prove to them that we are not what we think they think we are or, more precisely, that we were not who we think the audience thinks we were.
unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win.
The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers. That is why it is rare for the winners of highly coveted and publicized prizes to settle for their titles and retire. Winners, especially celebrated winners, must prove repeatedly they are winners. The script must be played over and over again. Titles must be defended by new contests. No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded enough. On the contrary, the visibility of our victories only tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.
Indeed, it is only by remembering what we have forgotten that we can enter into competition with sufficient intensity to be able to forget we have forgotten the character of all play: Whoever must play cannot play.
I am not touched by an other when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center—that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response.
The finite player’s interest is not in being healed, or made whole, but in being cured, or made functional. Healing restores me to play, curing restores me to competition in one or another game.
Aware that genuine sexual expression is at least as dangerous to society as genuine artistic expression, the sexual metaphysician can appeal to at least two powerful solutions. One is to treat sexuality as a process of reproduction; another is to place it in the area of feeling and behavior.
Finite sexuality is a form of theater in which the distance between persons is regularly reduced to zero but in which neither touches the other.
It is by no means an accident that the only successful attempt of the American citizenry to force the ending of a foreign war occurred simultaneously with a wide revision in sexual attitudes. The civilization quickly recovered from this threat, however, by tempting these revolutionaries into a new sexual politics, one of societal standoff, where sexual genius is confused with such struggles as the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and the election of women to national office.
