Читать книгу The Fall of Literary Theory - Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen - Страница 12

CHAPTER TWO

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE THREE MODES OF IDENTITY AND FALLENNESS

Before giving some detail in relation to the specifics of each “fall” or understanding of identity and before showing how the falls revolve around the same flaw in conceiving this identity, I have to explain in more depth why identity is perceived as fallen. For purposes of deconstructing the concept of identity, I define it as that which functions within language to create the illusion that individuals can reach the wholeness that they have lost. This is, as many will recognize, a very basic concept in Lacan’s psychoanalysis; I will offer a refresher for Lacan’s theory, to help me explain why subjects of language identify with signifiers that, they believe, confer identity to them.

Identity is a territory to be defended. Any territory becomes a signifier and can therefore be appropriated toward identity. Along with the fact that identity is never reached in actuality, identity’s fallenness accounts for the violence of its pursuit. To return to the notion of a territory to be defended, humans have long exceeded the spatial territory as what they need to defend and what gives them security.

As “owning” a territory equals in many ways having an identity, the defense of this territory (which can be land, or a more abstract object) goes beyond purposes of survival. The origins of the desire to defend the territory are not as important as the degree of abstraction exceeding the biological necessities prompting its defense. If, initially, social identity may have been given by the common belonging to a piece of land and carrying out basic activities in a communal setting, the territory on which the community functions is perceived as property and as the place of social integration only when the absence of this territory becomes a possibility or is actualized, by threats from another tribe, another nation, another religion, and so on. As with any concept formation (to follow structuralist and poststructuralist explanations of meaning emerging from opposition or absence), the meaning of territory and the identification with it derive from conceiving of not being in its possession, or not belonging to it. Migration and conquest are two of the most important factors in making territory abstract and creating the grounds for the formation of the concept of identity as internalized territory.

Human communities have evolved in such a way that there is no community that has remained in possession (or in sole possession) of the territory that it remembers as its cradle. It is enough to recall the controversy surrounding the term “African American,” which identifies a community with a concrete territory that they do not physically belong to (Africa). Every community also functions by remembering, which makes the concept of identity strictly related to what the community remembers as having lost. The loss is either total, as in the case of entire populations driven away from their land (Jewish people, Native Americans, African slaves), or partial, as in the case of being conquered and occupied by a different community and assimilated into it (Roman infiltrations into other cultures, for instance); also a partial loss is the case of any mixing of nations, religions, or other kinds of communities in one territory due to migration, immigration, or other forms of cultural interaction. This conception of losing a territory to somebody else only matters, in terms of identity, if it is remembered—either through story, or through recorded history.

Given the plasticity of the world, territory has lost its physical importance not only in our age of mass communication and mass transportation, but also from the very beginning of this remembering. From Rousseau’s “liberty” to Heidegger’s “dwelling” in the home of truth (within language),1 the notion of territory has reached complex levels of abstraction. It may be that what still connects territory in its initial understanding (as land) to abstract territoriality is the tendency of communities once occupying the same territory to remain somewhat connected to each other and somewhat attached to their initial perception of themselves as identical to each other. Anything they carried with them in the initial loss, or fall from territory, or anything that remains theirs after being invaded, or after accepting others among them, will become a stake in preserving identity.

One might think of practices that become cultural, such as a common way to make pottery, or the weapons certain peoples use in killing their enemies; if these are recorded in any way, they are part of the identity of that community and become their cultural baggage. As history advances, these tokens of identity become even more abstract, and turn into ideas and ideologies. The gods embraced by the members of a community, the common fears, their way to perceive food, evil, love, hate, family, and any other concepts, also become tokens of identity. In linguistic terms, signifiers “represent” identity: for instance, the identity of citizens of the United States is represented through the flag, in its number of stars. Yet “real” America is not somewhere in the flag, since an actual identity behind the signifier is not an actual “presence,” as Derrida would say.

The struggle to purify the identity of a community is always doomed to failure: nobody will eliminate all foreigners from a country, or all pagans from a nation, or retrieve a land that waits for them empty. Faced with such circumstances, communities in this day and age have to decide what it is that can still be brought back from what is supposed to have been lost. According to this logic, if not the land, at least freedom could be brought back, the freedom associated with not having somebody else dictate the social order of that community (as in the case of diverse America still finding unity in the concept of freedom: the freedom to shop, the freedom to be fashionable, the freedom to react to threats, or any other freedom). If not complete unity against foreign elements, these communities will seek at least unity around a God, a social organization, or the history that unifies them.

In so many examples of conflicts between communities whose territories have been disputed throughout the centuries (such as Israel vs. Palestine, Pakistan vs. India, Hungary vs. Romania), these communities’ religions, degree of civilization, or other abstract territories are used as reasons to continue to identify with the disputed physical territory. When they have to settle for a smaller piece of land, they demand more “rights” to an abstract territory (their language to be recognized as official, their religion to be practiced freely). The violence of defending a territory can be justified by anything that is included in the process of identity production.

Even self-identity is a territory to defend, because the individual who creates meaning through “authentic” signifiers will still defend those signifiers as if they were his/her property, such as the “original” work of an artist. Meaninglessness or floating signifiers are also potential property or territory for those who circulate them in a decentralized market. As long as something “sells,” even an idea, it is a territory and it can be defended because it can be part of the process of identification. Even though postmodern identity appears as the attempt to divorce identity from territory, given that territory is already language, identity cannot become any less a stake in language, so that the same set of problems is maintained.

The starting assumption for the three modes of identity is that there is no subject outside of the system of language that defines territoriality, since it is the remainder of the initially lost reality. There is no circumstance in which subject, language, and meaning can be taken apart or define themselves in any way divorced from each other. The instability of one triggers the questioning of the others in such a way that, if there is no social space in which the subject searches for meaning, whether by identification or rejection, there is also no subject and no meaning because there is no framework in which to engage in identity definition. If there is no subjecthood, any given social system has nothing to sustain the power dynamics that establishes its meaning, or its territory: ever since G. W. Hegel, the master has been understood as a master only if there is a slave too (or a subject), while there is no subject without a master (even an abstract one) to be subjected to.

If meaning itself (as master) is destabilized, the system it supports and its subjects also lose the stability they draw from meaning. There is no territory if there is nobody who has lost it. Usually, the members of a community reinforce the concept of territory, in order for it to sustain their meaning, or their desired identity. For instance, an oppressed social group like that of African Americans has to forge a meaning, a communal territory, which, abstractly, is “race,” but can also acquire a “territory” that can be defended. This issue is complicated by the fact that black Americans have to define themselves within a territory that has already been defined by those who bereaved them of their initial territory, so that territory has to remain a stake in resisting the forces that strip them of identity. In the contemporary world, we can look at the example of “the hood” as the territory in which, for instance, rap communities forge an identity, a territory defended against contamination by inauthentic rappers.

For the social structure to function and to allow the individual to function inside of it, any destabilized factor is turned into a stake. The need for the social structure to be (re)affirmed is predicated upon a challenge, an unknown, anything destabilizing. The territory is continuously redefined. It is not possible to determine an ultimate starting point where any constitutive factors can be identified as origin, in the sense of prior to any other (whether larger factors like society, the individual, or meaning, or related ones such as the sign, the family, or any other social unit, power relations, and so forth). In the terms advanced by Lacan, anything pertaining to the imaginary or to the symbolic cannot be given priority since, when individuality joins the social space, all the elements are already there, in the mirror stage (the initial stage of self-perception). He also goes on to claim that, as far as the subject is concerned, there is no other stage besides the mirror stage, while the real is always lost because of alienation into the social self. The subject speaks by abolishing itself as real, by already having lost the territory.

This real will never be retrieved since language and the social systems that function within language can only retrieve it by defining it. The real, as the outside/prior to language, escapes definition since there is no such thing as not-language, once language is the means to retrieving non-meaning. All the signs, or signifiers, which the territory has become, even the “land” sign, are not the “real” territory that has been lost by the community. All objects defining territory have become language and, for us, they signify, rather than simply exist. That is why territory is never not an abstraction, and always a “real” to be retrieved. Unfortunately, then, the real also contains its subjects, who will always try to define this real and derive their identity from it. This is why, from the perspective of language, everything is always a fall and a loss.

Now, as I have mentioned, Lacan and other poststructuralists have been stamped with the stigma of irrelevance to the “real world” due to the abstractness of their theories, and it is true that language cannot be discussed without abstraction. But let’s consider that Lacan’s understanding of the connections between the real, signifiers, and desire is relevant due to the enormous, very real consequences of the fact that territory has become abstract, which means it can be infinitely defended. This renewable and flexible abstract territory points to the perspective of the fall that I am suggesting: anything can be lost, which means anything can be fought for in an attempt to retrieve it or save it from impurities.

The three modes of understanding the loss of territory, or the fall, are by no means separate historically. Identities, or territories, and their loss always coexist. It is true that different moments in time bring changes to the perception of identity and the fall, but the changes are never final. People’s lives do change, and many times revolutions bring monumental improvements in the way people live. Otherwise we would not be speaking of the end of feudalism, the end of slavery, or the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. However, there are essentialist ways of perceiving social identity and self-identity that have not changed. For instance, violence against racial others continued even after the bondage of slavery was abolished.

Historic changes only shift the emphasis on how identity is constructed, due to variations in the stakes that language raises. If we accept the definition of the individual as a subject of language, we should also accept that this subjection is what drives the subject to believe that language has robbed it of something essential, which is the real. In the real, the subject imagines the ideal, or whole selfhood exists (i.e., one that is not lacking). This is why the real, overtaken by the imaginary and the symbolic, is precisely this lost territory I began to explain. It is this abstract territory and its signifiers that individuals and communities become attached to, and to which they turn when they become convinced they can retrieve their lost identity.

Lacan also emphasizes the perspective of the past in the formation of the subject: “the subject is there to rediscover where it was—I anticipate—the real .... Where it was, the Ich—the subject, not psychology—the subject, must come into existence. And there is only one method of knowing that one is there, namely, to map the network .... One goes back and forth over one’s ground, one crosses one’s path.”2 Obviously, Lacan also associates a notion of territoriality to the formation of the subject, and he is not the only one to do so (see Michel Foucault3 or Spanos4). Lacan’s notion of the subject formed within the lack of the real can explain the notion of the fall itself, as what is unnecessarily but stubbornly insisted on in relation to identity.

The reason why I find Lacan more useful than others (though I draw ideas from Derrida as well, and to some extent Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others), is that Lacan unequivocally claims that the subject is founded on a misrecognition. This is to say, what the subject desires as an identity is what the subject assumes to have lost (hence recognizes). In actuality, this recognition leads to an illusion of self-identity (hence misrecognized) that drives human beings to identify with an image/symbol all throughout their lives. Critics of Lacan claim that he dooms and restricts subjects to being deluded.5 The point is, however, that Lacan offers an explanation that is tremendously useful in trying to disengage human thought from the idealism of linguistic identity. If we agree with Lacan’s logic, our efforts should be directed toward how we can change (even to an infinitesimal extent) this perception of ourselves, rather than hide behind a judgment that reinforces our misconception that we are in need of retrieving something lost. Is it even possible, one would ask, to conceive of a way in which we can function and see ourselves as other than such fallen subjects? Although that is close to impossible, we can certainly acknowledge that “recognizing” ourselves is what drives us toward violence, because we will never stop on our way to reaching that elusive object of desire, which is the self. This is what places us in an irreconcilable position toward others; the more we define ourselves, the more tension we create with others.

Lacan best explains this conflict by placing truth, speech, and self in the Other, against which the subject is defined. He arrives at this now overly-used and re-used concept of the “capital Other”6 from a basic critique of Rene Descartes,7 and further exploration of ideas developed by Hegel7 and Alexandre Kojeve.9 Lacan’s contribution is to claim that the Other organizes the unconscious, which becomes “the discourse of the Other”:10 “You will then see that it is in the Other that the subject is constituted as ideal, that he has to regulate the completion of what comes as ego, or ideal ego … that is to say, to constitute himself in his imaginary reality …. This is also the point from which he speaks, since in so far as he speaks, it is in the locus of the Other that he begins to constitute that truthful lie by which is initiated that which participates in desire.”11

If we go back to the idea of a territory that has been lost, that which constitutes identity (which has become abstract) is always lost to an Other. The subject who is in search for confirmation of self-identity sees a threat in any other human being, because any other human being is potentially the initial thief of the territory that has given rise to the need for possessing the territory. So either the Other is made part of the territory to be retrieved, or the territory has to be defended from this Other, because the conflict is formative. But this is what can be overcome through a realization of the illusory nature of territoriality. Awareness, of course, is not enough, given that social practices that bring comfort are most of the time preferred to those that require effort. However, social change cannot be brought about without awareness of deeply embedded problems arising from the abstraction of territory.

We need to remain open to the possibility of becoming at least in part detached from the effects of speech on ourselves by recognizing that the people surrounding us have not stolen our identity, and cannot steal it, since we always are who we are, not entities that were only retrospectively whole. This way, we can find a new kind of openness toward an Other that would not be primordially an enemy. Since, for social beings, there is no outside of language (or of their sociality), at least we can stop making identity such a bitter stake. This book points to some approaches to the Other (borrowing a few points from Emmanuel Levinas), in order to overcome, possibly, the essential misconceptions that propel us, through desire, toward death.

The First Fall: Mythical Identity

Approaching innocence in conjunction with the system of language (be it defined as mythical—after the fact—or religious, political, historical, and so on) allows us to understand why communities that prescribe the way to righteousness to their subjects make wholeness an enormous stake and see themselves as justified in eliminating anything less than ideal (and all subjects must be understood as less than ideal). These threats are perceived as standing in the way of achieving purity, or of retrieving the state of unfallenness.

Approaching “innocence” at the beginning of this study is therefore necessary because of the importance we tend to attribute to collective definitions of the lost real as far as nations, religions, social organizations, and historical frictions are concerned, especially in the Western cultures. Hitler notoriously sold his sinister plans to the German people by promising a retrieval of the lost integrity of the German identity. For the good of their collective identity, Germans were expected to embrace Nazism because it offered a self-definition to the nation as a unit. The Catholic Church, as another example, prompts believers to identify with Christianity because it offers an identity, “under Christ,” to all those who have faith.

Two possibilities exist. A subject either acknowledges fallenness and strives to overcome it, or else he/she is unwelcome in the social order and is denied identity. It is very important to explain why everything that a social system rejects is rejected in the name of innocence, an innocence that nobody has and nobody will ever have.

Nonetheless, this innocence gives tremendous momentum to the functioning of the social fabric, because it is what connects the social space to the lost territory. Let me attempt to explain how innocence survives as a stake after ages of violence in its name, because it is always deferred, so it always remains possible. For its violence to cease, the stakes need to be altogether abandoned, which, as I will show, cannot be done simply by shifting to another mode of perceiving the fall.

In my definition, innocence is an imaginary construct that forms the social subject through its loss, and which is imposed primarily on (and attributed to) those in the first stages of life (children). Given this analogy, the concept of game—as arbitrary or not essential practice of a community, based on an accepted set of rules—becomes relevant in relating innocence to the social world. I will show that the game draws individuals into language, and against the Other as opponent, through obligation derived from legitimation and from the promise of the possible (i.e. wholeness). The game, which has claims to knowledge about the lost territory, works through the opposition between centrality (institutionalization) and those who are excluded, the corruption that is presupposed in the notion of purity. On this topic, Derrida’s Dissemination will be useful in explaining the processes of inclusion and exclusion, which dictate the death of the individual for the sake of the social system.

If innocence means being harmless (etymologically)12 and is also what has been lost, and if the whole of the social space has lost that innocence, it follows that a social system whose identity is at stake must work continuously toward not being harmful to itself. For the system to be finally whole, it would mean that all of its individuals would work so harmoniously to sustain it that no alteration would further be needed within it. This is assumed to have been the starting point of any given system within language, before it has been corrupted by individuality, by foreign elements occupying the territory. Yes, it is true! Any individual ultimately corrupts any territory. Of course, the moment before this corruption is misrecognized as innocent and it is a mythical construct. Contrary to the traditional association between innocence and childhood, for the purposes of the social space, the child’s desire is a social desire, and the child is born into fallenness. Even though childhood is commonly essentialized qua innocence,13 it is only in retrospect that it appears as such, and in connection to a mythical territory. In order to see how the concepts of fallenness and innocence are violent, the child needs to be seen as already in language as soon as the child acquires a position in the social space (which happens as soon as the child enters the mirror stage).

The child does not exist outside relationality. The fantasy of totality misrecognized in the mirror stage is a spatial metaphor used to demonstrate that the social system is already inscribed on the (imaginary) body of the baby, to “mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development,” explains Lacan.14 The imago, which is situated in the symbolic space of the Other, “inaugurates … the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.”15 As the baby now sees itself as whole, this is an already socially defined baby, with a place in the social space that is already expecting him or her even before birth. In actuality, innocence cannot be traced back to the space of childhood, because childhood is part of the territory.

Innocence is then a symbolic and not a “real” concept. It is not something that a child possesses, but what a child is expected to possess and to lose in the process of becoming an adult. With maturity, the subject attaches desire, in the unconscious, to the loss with which it has already identified. It is important to acknowledge that this misrecognition already takes place at the foundation of individuality, and is not something that the subject comes across along the way.

The most convenient definition of the fall from innocence is encountered in the Judeo-Christian conception of the fall, or that generally given by Western orthodox theologians. The notion of sin is not related to a voluntary transgression from something otherwise ideal, but to a corruption in which all participate by being born into the very system that defines corruption. This is why there are no degrees to sin, because anything less than whole is enormously distanced from that wholeness (here, God).

In order to exist at all, the system (mythical, religious, social, political) must always be right. This does not mean that the system is a space of wholeness. It is only the space where identity (as whole) exists as a possibility, but nobody will reach wholeness within the social space. Even though it is rather strange to say that neither the system is whole, nor anybody in it, we can say that, as no territory is the initial territory, no social system reaches the level of sacredness that the ideal, lost realm of wholeness is supposed to possess. The sacred is characterized by wholeness. Religion, as other social orders, strives to structure the social space based on the sacred model. This model is not in the world and will never belong to the world. If sin is a rupture in wholeness, what is ruptured is not in the social space but in what this space has lost in constituting itself, the “Great Time” that is only a has-been and a to-be but never a present.

This is where Derrida pinpointed the flaw that will never leave any system that tries to define itself. If language as representation is the site where it all “begins,” then in language the efforts to define anything within strict limits appear as necessarily doomed to failure. Representation places everything in the space of its own potential, as representation cannot exist without contamination—but a redeemable contamination. For Derrida, contamination is language itself. This “grand Parasite” that prevents any discourse from being pure, or “serious,” is the very condition of possibility of the functioning of language, or of its iterability. In Limited Inc, he maintains that iterability is the ability of language to be disseminated and, in the process, of losing its initial message, which becomes only a trace, instead of a presence. Contamination is at the heart of the transmissibility of language.

The system functions in view of a purpose projected from a misrecognized past, and fallenness is all that has not yet reached the goal of wholeness. For this reason, it is not enough to function within the system, and not against it, but the subject of language must serve the purpose of language.

A system, language, the symbolic: these terms already imply an (ideally) ordered interaction between their subjects, or rather, those who have chosen to belong to these realms. The reason why every participant (even unwilling participants) sustains this ordered interaction is related to lack and desire. These two concepts condition the individuals, and individuals condition one another, based on their need to fulfill their own definition through the Other, who has given them a glimpse at themselves from the very start. In other words, participation is a function of the desire for recognition, identified by Hegel, for whom the Other is only a mediation between self and self, or the negative of self. The self and the Other are entities who “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”16 The concept of recognition is refined by Alexandre Kojéve, who points out that desire is directed toward another desire, so that “human reality can only be social …. If the human reality is a social reality, society is human only as a set of Desires mutually desiring one another as Desires.”17

What this would mean as far as identity is concerned is that every subject desires to possess an identity that is desired by an Other, but both the self and the Other remain at the level of desiring, because the recognition of their identity cannot be fully realized. Lacan brings this line of thought to further refinement by shifting the discussion to language. Here, desire has no object, but involves a movement from signifier to signifier, where every subject becomes a signifier for another signifier precisely because every Other whose desire is desired is a mirror reflection of a mirror reflection, a remainder (what he called objet petit a) of a hypothetical lost unity, or territory.

The connection between the concept of desire and fallenness should be clear by now. An organizing system in itself does not offer innocence (the lost perfection) except as potential, and as something lost and to be retrieved only in death. It follows that there is no ultimate signifier that can be possessed in actuality, during one’s life. The search for innocence is a death sentence. It brings death to those who refuse to partake in its potentiality and it structures individuals around the pursuit of death. Take the Judeo-Christian model, where wholeness is achieved post-mortem, after a life of imperfection improved by sacrifice. Last but not least, the pursuit of innocence also excludes certain people from the search for innocence: the uncivilized, the enemy, the Other.

We can say, therefore, that the fall from and toward innocence is a mythical concept in the sense that it is an organizing principle. It is always present through its absence, so it is needed in order to define a system unstable without it. Innocence is a stake, while being fallen is a momentum solidified into law. In the convenient example of Judeo-Christianity, humanity’s identity is defined through the loss of the territory of Eden, a loss solidified into the law of God that dictates that innocence has to be retrieved.

The system is unstable because it needs to define a stake, appealing to all the participants’ sense of having lost wholeness. As I explained before, social systems (particularly Western social systems) are organized as games to which the players are born subscribed. The theory that unifies civilization with the notion of game is nothing new in itself. What is important is that the game that the social system represents is not actually played, since it is itself deferred and its players are not real players, because of their fallenness. The child born into language begins to act in the social space through game. This is the first interaction outside of (but reenacting or reinforcing) the family hierarchy. The child learns that there are rules to go by, and that if the rules are not followed, the child as individual player will fall outside of the game. The difference between the game world and the social world into which the child grows is that the game is always perfect, and reenacted with different players. This is what is embedded into the unconscious of the child, for use in later life: the social system can become perfect if the game is played correctly by all participants. Famously, in 1938, Johan Huizinga developed a theory (in Homo Ludens) claiming that play is a civilizing factor. To him, play is a ritual prior to and superior to culture, ingraining in people a consciousness of being embedded in a sacred order of things” where, through play, consciousness “finds its first, highest, and holiest expression.”18

Huizinga seems to suggest that game pre-exists the social space. Since he equates the make-belief of the game with religious belief, the pretense is not that there is a game, in his theory, but that the player is worthy of the game that is received as a sacred inheritance. He also emphasizes the agonistic and competitive nature of the game, which suggests that there is an opponent against whom the player needs to prove superiority. It is inside the game that the child first learns that hierarchies are the way to perfection, so power and subjecthood as identity are learned through an ideal model that the game represents. In the game, the “other” is another person, but underlying that is the Other against whom the player will always need to compete. No matter how many opponents are overcome, there will always be other opponents, so that superiority is never absolute.

Derrida defines language and pharmakon19 as the prior medium where differentiation is born, as well as the opposition between the eidos and its other.20 What is missing in Huizinga’s model is the absence of the opponent, in the sense that Huizinga does not recognize that concrete opponents are as imperfect as the self. The ideal, or “real” opponent would be the perfect opponent, who is both innocent (because it is the Other, whole), and evil because the player’s fallenness is projected upon this opponent. This is why the pharmakon is both the poison and the cure, evil both internalized and externalized. The dynamic of difference is to be understood as the relation between presence and non-presence, both being the sites of truth, or the game. Dialectics, as play, especially in relation to truth (all the way from Plato), is also a deferred play.21

But players will not be satisfied to know that the game is deferred and that they are not playing in actuality. As they learned in childhood games, identity through the game is possible and it is also the only way to achieve social identity. They need to know that their belonging to language is governed by causality, and a confrontation “to the death” affirms them in their retrievable innocence. That is why the rule of the game must appear as stable. For this to happen, in societies for whom their own stabilization is at stake, the laws governing them are a result of the solidification or, rather, legitimization, of a tentative rule.

Lyotard’s contribution to a discussion of the game is to suggest that these rules stabilize into laws when the game becomes an obligation. And if we think about it, knowing that the boundaries are always contaminated by what is outside of the game, the law will all the more push its players into the realm of possibility, so that for fear of losing that possibility (of unfallenness), the players will of their own accord protect the boundaries of the game out of a sense of self-serving duty. These boundaries will never be stable enough but will strive for stability at the cost of anybody else’s game. Even the most democratic societies restrict the participation of other systems, by requiring them to conform to democracy, so that other games are assimilated. For instance, immigrants from other parts of the world (especially after the second generation) are likely to renounce participation in their old political system, and will vote for an American president along with the other subjects of democracy.

The social game appeals to its players by proving its superiority when compared to any other game. Players do have a choice, but when they assimilate the rule/law of the game, they become its senders. They legitimize that particular game that still leaves them in the realm of possibility (of retrieving its territory). According to Lyotard, the player enters the game by also accepting the hierarchy of other game possibilities, and then the player creates a hierarchy by which one game dominates the others. Such hierarchies legitimize oppression because “it is supposed that the so-called ontological language game can translate all others.”22 In other words, to retrieve a territory, others’ territories need to be subordinated, to such an extent that the others become part of the territory. The American dream, for instance, is a network of institutions by which, going through a set of tests, attending qualifying schools, and taking all the right steps, one can achieve one’s dream, a dream defined a priori or inscribed into the territory of the American dream.

The completion of the game would mean that there is no need any longer for new players to subscribe to it, since it has fulfilled its potential. However, since it only presents as a stake the possible, this is the only realm in which the players are validated as possible players. By rehearsing their role in the ideal game, the players validate in their turn the possibility for the game to actually be completed. The only circumstance in which a player would actually fulfill the possibility of the role in the game would be for the player to be the Other, not the subject defined from the perspective of the Other. But since the game itself, or language, will never stop sliding along the signifying chain, and never reach the real, the Other will never not be a signifier, and will never arrive: “l’invention n’invente rien, lonrsque’en elle l’autre ne viens pas …. Car l’autre n’est pas le possible. Il faudrait donc dire que la seule invention possible serait l’invention de l’impossible.”23

When the game thinks itself unstable, the players are not convinced anymore that the game guarantees them a “real” role. When such distrust occurs, the game needs to define its limits even more rigidly. It needs to reassert the possibility of superiority (something to win) that will be conferred on the players, a possibility which the players take more and more literally. They will defend the game if the fulfillment of the game appears to be tangible. The violence of the players is proportionate to the violence of the system. It is not an accident, for instance, that in Europe and other parts of the world where national identity is more disputed, a game such as soccer stirs (or at least used to stir) much more violence among the audience than games played in the United States. The soccer stadium becomes a representation of the national territory to be defended, and the game reflects the social game of national identity that defines the stakes in the interaction between soccer fans.

The limits that the system (re)defines are stabilized through repetition, which is the only way for the game to reinforce itself. There is a center that coordinates the ritual preserving the game and, in relation to this center, obligation reinforces the game. The reality of a center does not directly translate into the position of unfallenness, even though it would seem that this should be the case. For instance, missionary work, even though regulated by an institution, does not achieve its purpose of recruiting fallen beings in the name of the institution, but in the name of what the institution is not, but “represents.” The institution manipulates the notion of possibility. This manipulation is always “in the name of,” “toward,” or offers a way of reaching what that institutional center has not in itself reached. The institutions that define the territory are not absolute, but utilize the absolute signified as method or justification for their functioning.