Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.

“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre).

Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out—when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.

To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.

All the moves of a finite player must be deceptive: feints, distractions, falsifications, misdirections, mystifications.

Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

One can be dead in life, or one can be alive in death.

Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.

The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. Infinite play resounds throughout with a kind of laughter.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition.

Inasmuch as power is determined by the outcome of a game, one does not win by being powerful; one wins to be powerful. If one has sufficient power to win before the game has begun, what follows is not a game at all.

Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is “the last, best hope on earth.” It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels. Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history.

We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.

Only that which can change can continue:

It is because of the essential theatricality of politics that infinite players do not take sides in political issues—at least not seriously. Instead they enter into social conflict dramatically, attempting to offer a vision of continuity and open-endedness in place of the heroic final scene.

One does not win by power; one wins to be powerful.

It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.

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.

It is notable that very large collections of art, and all the world’s major museums, are the work of the very rich or of societies during strongly nationalistic periods.

Such museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.

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 is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders. Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art.

Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.

War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.

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.

To separate the poiema from poiesis, the created object from the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.

A robot can say words but cannot say them to you.

You can have what you have only by releasing it to others.

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.

This means that we can be moved only by persons who are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be. When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within—and whoever touches me is touched as well.

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.

Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires a particular past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.

An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player’s way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.

Major challenges, however, are too serious to be met with argument, or with sharpened explanation. They call either for outright and wholesale rejection, or for conversion.

Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent.

It is only by magisterial speech that the emblematic property of winners can be safeguarded.

Metaphor is horizonal, reminding us that it is one’s vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.

Infinite speakers do not therefore appeal to a world as audience, do not speak before a world, but present themselves as an audience by way of talking with others.

Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing.

The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself.

Vitality cannot be given, only found.

Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are.

But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century’s grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.

So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.

“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust).