Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy”
Builds on Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, and others (315)
“human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction” (315)
“a very important stage” is when one becomes able “to recognize that the other individual’s and its own signals are only signals” (315)
Witnessing animals playing, Bateson responds: “this phenomenon, play, could only occur if the particpant organisms were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would carry the message ‘This is play’” (316)
This message “generate[s] a paradox … a negative statement containing an implicit negative metastatement” (317)
That is: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (317)
Or: “These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote” (317)
Thus: “The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (317)
“language bears to the objects which it denotes a relationship comparable to that which a map bears to a territory” (317)
“the actions of ‘play’ are related to, or denote, other actions of ‘not play’” (317)
Commentator’s Note: Videogames are especially interesting. The movements of the controller or mouse and keyboard are not what is seen on screen. Furthermore, what is seen on screen is not what it depicts but itself (if we eschew a representational understanding; i.e., The Last of Us depicts a world that looks like ours but is not. It is an increasement of being. It adds to the real).
“the evolution of play may have been an important step in the evolution of communication” (317)
Other examples: threats (317), histrionics (318)
“brief analysis of childhood behavior shows that such combinations as histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing play in response to threat, histrionic threat, and so on form together a single total complex of phenomena” (318)
“two peculiarities of play: (a) that the messages or signals exchanged in play are in a certain sense untrue or not meant; and (b) that that which is denoted by these signals is nonexistent” (319)
“play marks a step forward in the evolution of communication—the crucial step in the discovery of map-territory relations” (321)
“The message ‘This is play’ … tells the receiver that certains nips and other meaningful actions are not messages of the first type,” that is, “mood-signs” (325)
“The message ‘This is play’ thus sets a frame of the sort which is likely to precipitate paradox: it is an attempt to discriminate between, or to draw a line between categories of different logical types” (325)
“Our central thesis may be summed up as a statement of the necessity of the paradoxes of abstraction” (327)
“the paradoxes of abstraction must make their appearance in all communication more complex than that of mood-signals, and that without these paradoxes the evolution of communication would be at an end” (327)
Game
- Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP