Sociological Aspects

A second determining reference is sociological. Here, for Axelos, the Marxist intervention is crucial:

Perhaps the world game also revealed itself to Marx as a game: after the resolution of the alienation of labor, and even after communism has been overcome, couldn’t the history of humanity - and not only this - manifest itself as a game, a game in which the inviolable essence of alienation would also play a role?^[20]

One can see not only Axelos’s unique attempt to articulate the irreduc- ibly antagonistic projects of Marx and Heidegger on the terrain of game and play, but, in doing so, to enable the possibility of another relation to transforming the world that is not simply under the technical, nihilistic or metaphysical domination of teleology, of supersession, of the necessity for destruction.

We should also mention the sequence of important twentieth-century historical and sociological studies of the centrality of play in human affairs, often non- or anti-Marxist, such as those of Johan Huizinga, Nobert Elias or Roger Caillois. For such scholars, civilisation is incomprehensible with­out an attention to its sport and leisure activities, which integrally bear on religion, law, economics, politics, warfare, technology and so on. Huizinga’s important text Homo Ludens, for example, seeks to establish play as an essen­tial anthropological activity separated from purposive economic activity, to the extent that all culture is born from and is sustained by play, inducing players’ intense absorption in unproductive and separative games.^[21] Cultures are inevitably caught up with games of every kind, and yet cultures are also differentiated precisely by the different sorts of games they play in different circumstances and with different ends.

For his part, Caillois both criticises and extends Huizinga’s researches, in showing that, while play is not necessarily productive, it is not always entirely uneconomic in that it often prioritises the exchange of property - even if often to the point of destruction and ruination. Games themselves do not always have established rules (child’s play with dolls, for instance), and often have a relation to the as if of fiction-making.

All four indeed belong to the domain of play. One plays football, billiards, or chess (agon); roulette or a lottery (alea); pirate, Nero, or Hamlet (mim­icry); or one produces in oneself, by a rapid whirling or falling movement, a state of dizziness and disorder (ilinx).^[22]

This quadrature of ‘competition, chance, simulation or vertigo’ moreover does not cover the entire universe of play, which indicates the becoming-rule of chaos in human existence, indexing the powers of paidia, a drive for free­dom, on the one hand, and ludus, an enjoyment of difficulty, on the other. Here, Caillois’s divisions start to index the integration of sociology with psychology, another division and relation of importance to Axelos.