Cybernetic Aspects
But perhaps the most fraught and determining context is one which is at once global, actual and linked to a bundle of technological and intellectual projects that were given their most determining configuration in and by World War II: game theory.
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, this ‘project’, having enhanced and then merged with cybernetics and associated developments, served to found the success of what is today too-easily called ‘neoliberalism’: the planet has been globalised in real time by such developments as the World Wide Web, and there is nobody whose life is not directly and immediately affected by the products of Silicon Valley and its epigones. From mineral extraction, material transportation, industrial assembly, retail, advertising, product design, logistical planning, financing and beyond, all anthropological activity on the planet is now coordinated and organised according to the exigencies of computational technology - and one of the primary ways in which this technology has so successfully globalised itself while globalising the planet is precisely through the absolute centrality of games in its theory and practice.Indeed, one text that is widely considered to have given this formation its decisive impetus bears the word in its title: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944).[31] In ‘Chapter II: General Formal Description of Games of Strategy’, the authors make a number of fundamental distinctions:
First, one must distinguish between the abstract concept of a game, and the individual plays of that game. The game is simply the totality of the rules which describe it. Every particular instance at which the game is played - in a particular way - from beginning to end, is a play.
Second, the corresponding distinction should be made for the moves, which are the component elements of the game... The specific alternative chosen in a concrete instance - i.e. in a concrete play - is the choice. Thus the moves are related to the choices in the same way as the game is to the play. The game consists of a sequence of moves, and the play of a sequence of choices. Finally, the rules of the game should not be confused with the strategies of the players.[32]These distinctions - between game and play, move and choice, rule and strategy - are mathematised and technicised in such a way as to determine and evaluate potential strategies and maximise rational outcomes. Moreover, this is done precisely in order to render a hitherto-unexpected diversity of human activities susceptible to fundamental rationalisation: economics most obviously in the first instance, but also, quite immediately, the game of war.
Indeed, given the context of total war in which it was forged, in its expansion and integration of previously relatively autonomous divisions of the life-world, game theory perhaps almost inevitably entailed their concomitant militarisation too. Such a militarisation, crucially, did not simply revive older or received notions of the status of the enemy - that of a subhuman aggressor or anonymous victim, nationalist or racist, for example - but rather, as Peter Galison has put it, as ‘a mechanized Enemy Other, generated in the laboratory-based science wars of MIT and a myriad of universities around the United States and Britain, not to speak of the tens of laboratories in the countries of the Axis’.[33] What is crucial here is that in its implementation in economics, finance, human resource management and so on, every ludic interaction thereafter becomes de facto a face-off with an enemy who knows the game at least as well as you do and whose basic strategy must a priori be considered to be the seeking of their own maximal outcomes.
In other words, the Other must now be practically considered an automated inhuman rationator who will play the game in the most implacable way. One immediately sees how and why such thinkers as Heidegger in his post-World War II work took cybernetics to be an absolute enemy of his own project of thinking, naming and shaming it as one contemporaneously dominant expression of the essence of technology as Gestell (‘enframing’ in the standard English translation), and whose own roots are sunk deep - if in a complex and overdetermined fashion - into the metaphysical tradition.We now have a general context for games and play from which Axelos’s work emerges and into which it is intervening. This context is simultaneously: ontological, in that it gathers and expresses something about the emergence, transformation and orders of existence across vast temporal and spatial distances; socio-political, in that all social organisations place an extraordinary premium upon games, which effect and sustain essential mediations between different regimes and orders of the social body; psychological, in that play serves to bind trauma, to enable development and support varied mediations that are at once sub- and supra-personal; ethical, in the sense that games and play are differentiated compositions of languages and bodies in an expanded field of activity; and technomilitaristic, in which the reinscription of all action according to a model of wargaming is submitted to ceaseless development and implementation across the diversity of the socius itself. The conceptions of games and play developed in these modes of thought are stringently limited by their own disciplinary foci, yet cannot help but push towards their own limits. These orientations are not only irreducible to each other - in some cases, quite deliberately so - but establish a kind of force field of extreme tensions regarding the status of games and play that conditions the entire post-World War II situation.