Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy

6. Ludic Ethics

6 Ludic Ethics To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil No doubt the pairing of ludology and ethics can be examined along the lines of violence, morality, and problematic virtual social interactions, as scholars such as Miguel Sicart have done in his book, The Ethics of Computer Games (Sicart 2009). Such studies are necessary and significant. But before I engage Sicart, it is also necessary to situate the context in which play and morality have long been injuriously paired. This context has an ancient history and is born of the conflicts that arise when human anxiety is unable to cope with its own mortality. Into this context, Nietzsche injects the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who understood the struggle of all life as a game. Nietzsche explains in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: Do guilt, injustice, contradiction and suffering exist in this world? They do, proclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited human mind which sees things apart but not connected, not for the con-tuitive god. For him all contradictions run into harmony, invisible to the common human eye, yet understandable to one who, like Heraclitus, is related to the contemplative god. Before his fire-gaze not a drop of injustice remains in the world poured all around him; even that cardinal impulse that allows pure fire to inhabit such impure forms is mastered by him with a sublime metaphor. In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive , in forever equal innocence. And as children and artists play, so plays the everliving fire. It constructs and destroys, all in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. Transforming itself into water and earth, it builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down. From time to time it 138 Chapter 6 starts the game anew. An instant of satiety—and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by his need to create. Not hubris but the ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being. (Nietzsche [1873] 2006, 111) If the “impulse to play calls new worlds into being,” then this chapter argues that such new worlds are both ludic and ethical insofar as they are innocent of human-centered morality. If the “limited human mind which sees things apart but not connected” begins (anew) to think associatively, conductively, then this chapter aims to play with ethics “without any moral additive.” Derrida famously formulated the dilemma in terms of “the tension between play and presence” in his essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (Derrida [1966] 1978, 292). For Derrida, play is “always the play of absence and presence, but if it is to be thought radically, play must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence” (Derrida [1966] 1978, 292). And, I (with Nietzsche) would add, beyond good and evil. What Derrida suggests is a return to a “Nietzschean affirmation” of play, the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security. For there is a sure play . . . [that] dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play. . . . The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, throughout his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. (Derrida [1966] 1978, 292) What this chapter explores is the problem of negative ethics that, in its desire for a moral center, seeks the “end of play.” The irony is that the history of play reveals the birth of the unethical impulse, and the literate drive to diminish and end play ultimately becomes the unethical position. Borrowing a term...