Little black books for black times

Almost forgotten I'd written this, as part of the new paperback version of the PE's promotion - a long over-due (and far too short) appreciation of James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games as my 'Book of a Lifetime' (it has supplanted yet another small black book, Adorno's Minima Moralia, as my primary life-saving carry-around). The piece doesn't seem to be available online, so it's on extended post below.

I must admit, after our recent London Tube bombings, and particularly the mistaken assasination of Mr. Menezes, this quote from Minima on the bourgeois nature of walking (how Adornian) is all too relevant:

Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs.

Once people ran from dangers that were too desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror. Traffic regulations no longer need allow for wild animals, but they have not pacified running. It estranges us from bourgeois walking. The truth becomes visible that something is amiss with security, that the unleashed powers of life, be they mere vehicles, have to be escaped.

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

And here's some lefty satire to polish the insight off, thanks to Red Pepper magazine.

The Independent
2 Sept, 2005

Book of a Lifetime

Pat Kane on James Carse - Finite and Infinite Games

So far, in my adult reader's life, my essential books always seem to be small, black, minimalist paperbacks, containing tightly compressed thoughts of either cosmic or epochal significance. But I'm delighted to note that my current little black book is suffused with joy and possibility. Which is quite unlike the previous one: Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, (1948), a set of awesomely gloomy observations on the cultural after-shock of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Whenever things got too fake in my early music career, I would surrender myself to its asphyxiating coils of thought - in particular, Adorno's withering disdain for the glib positivities of the Californian dream to which he had been exiled. Minima Moralia kept you connected to the reality of authoritarianism and the violence of history, while taking cheap shots at cosmetics or lotteries: perfect for a indie- kid lost in show business.

My current shiny-black handheld comes from an entirely different place and pen: a salty New York theologian, writing as the embers of the counter- culture were doused, distilling a lifestyle revolution into a pocket philosophy. James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games (1976) reads like Socrates holding forth in Central Park, and proceeds from a startlingly fertile premise. 'A finite game is played for the purpose of winning; an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.'

Out of what initially seems a description of schoolyard etiquette, Carse erects an entire vision of 'life as play and possibility'. We are all players; which, for Carse, means we are all existentially free. But, as players, we have a clear choice about the social or political interactions we undertake. Finite players, in essence, believe in means-towards-an-end: the competitive discourse of power, war, politics, the marketplace. Infinite players believe the means are the ends: the process of making and breaking rules and routines, of growth through inclusion.

So far, so hippie. But Carse connects with Adorno in his concern for when finite games get mistaken for infinite games. Indeed, he goes as far as to say that 'evil is the termination of infinite play'. When that happens, we get the suprematism of a thousand-year Reich, or the endlessly- deferred victory of a Jihad or War on Terror.

For myself, Carse has become the optimism to counter Adorno's pessimism. Will reciprocity and empathy find a way through the networks of our world, no matter how extremist or fear-laden our lives get? What Carse offers is the model of a self that might bear this hope, and have the mentality to realise it. Ultimately, civilisations will play together, rather than clash. A better story from a little black book.