DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-134

Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

levesque.sim@gmail.com

Abstract

The object of this paper is to demonstrate that our understanding of play can be valuably enlightened by taking in account its biological determinations. Researches in the field of communication acknowledge for animals as well as for human beings the capacity to play, and consider the playful activity as a form of metacommunication that preceded the emergence of verbal language in the course of evolution. This hypothesis cannot be verified, but remains likely. Other hypotheses coexist regarding the role of play in learning processes and sociability, but I am not to be their proponent here. It is to the sphere of play in human beings interactions and its relations to the imaginary that I wish to restrain my remarks. In this field, French neurosurgeon, biologist and philosopher Henri Laborit (1914–1995) proved his genius by having initiated and defended throughout his life a unified theory based on the medical and behavioural principle of the inhibition of action; a principle, as he explains, by which emerged, in the human species, an important disposition, that is, concomitant to the development of symbolic language, being liable to flights of fancy, to escape in the realm of imagination, of built abstraction. And it is this flight that enables play – the liminal performative modality of existence. Since Laborit remains almost unknown outside of the francophonie, I wish to get his thoughts the attention deserved, especially vis-à-vis the fields of contemporary biosemiotics and performance studies.

Play encompasses a very wide range of phenomena. A practical way to deal with the ambiguity of play is to apprehend it by its rhetorics – the diverse way it is talked about. It is this method the play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith chose to put forward in his 1997 book The Ambiguity of Play. Sutton-Smith identified seven rhetorics of play: play as progress, play as fate, play as power, play as identity, play as the imaginary, play of the self, and play as a frivolous activity. Here is not the place to elaborate on each of these specifically; suffice to say that the main principle underlying these rhetorics, as Sutton-Smith develops them, is that none can be isolated and they altogether form an indefinite web of thoughts, prejudices, theories and knowledge beholding any possible version of play we can imagine and/or practice. I shall focus mainly on the rhetoric of play as the imaginary for the matter of this discussion, and on the relations connecting play, performance and language together.

The rhetoric of play as the imaginary rely on all sorts of games (whether spontaneous or organized) that favour idealization and stimulate the imaginative abilities, conceptual flexibility and the creation of ludic spaces within human culture as well as, to a certain extent, in the animal kingdom. Any abstract construction, whether it be narrative, logical or aesthetic, rely on this specific rhetoric; and the same applies for the competences required for their appreciation. But what exactly are these required competences, and how do they affect our attitude toward play? By putting forward the works of Henri Laborit, I shall try to establish some clear principles regarding the biological determinations of play as the imaginary.

A biosemiotic approach to play

It is an argument that aims to favour an appreciation of the biological dispositions of play that I wish to develop. This wish of mine to think of a phenomenon that is largely conceived as cultural within a deterministic grid and a biological schema must not be erroneously perceived. In no way is my goal driven by a radical reductionist paradigm, nor do I want to limit my comprehension of such a complex phenomenon within the interpretative frame of biology. Put simply, what has long been for me a persistent intuition now appears to point in that same direction where Thomas Sebeok knew how to pursue its assumed conviction. About his seminal works by which his unique and original contribution to the field of semiotics is largely recognized today – let us name here Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (1976), The Sign & Its Masters (1979) and The Play of Musement (1981) —, Sebeok wrote: “The pivotal motive pervading the Argument of this entire trilogy and interfused throughout all of these papers is my absolute conviction that semiotics begins and ends with biology and that the sign science and the life science ineluctably imply each other.” (Sebeok 1981: 4). Such a conviction, rather easily defendable, can be verified in the double principle of coding and control that governs life, macrocosmically as well as microcosmically. If we think of the mind (and thoughts) as the manifestation of the information encoded by our physical brain, then we ought to recognize for signs too, which are no more material than our thoughts, the necessity of a material support for them to become actual. Thus, Sebeok writes, “Signs pervade all of life as the encoded information that directs those ordered activities so that life continues.” (1981: 13). This model is in many ways similar to the one Laborit defended throughout his works, which he called, in a cybernetic fashion, “information-structure”, notably in the first chapter of La nouvelle grille initially published in 1974.

The heritage of Henri Laborit

It is to the French medical doctor, surgeon and neurobiologist Henri Laborit (1914–1995) that I will borrow a fair part of my line of argument for the matter of this discussion. Since Laborit remains almost unknown outside of the francophonie, I wish to get his thoughts the attention deserved, especially vis-à-vis the fields of contemporary biosemiotics and performance studies, where his ideas could be regarded as precursory. The heritage of Laborit let us see him as one of the foremost figure of the vast philosophical and scientific enterprise initiated in the course of the 20^th century at the crossing of the disciplines of the living and the comprehension of cell intelligence – biology, biochemistry and neurology, as well as ethology, behavioural psychology, cybernetics and semiotics, among others. Laborit described himself as a « eutonologist », eutonology referring to the study of tonus regulation in all biological functions (formed of eutonos, ‘normal tone’, ‘biological equilibrium’; and logos, ‘law’, ‘science’). In 1958, Laborit founded the self-financed (through money obtained from patented molecules) Laboratoire d’eutonologie (CEPEBPE) at the Boucicaut hospital (Paris, 15^e) and directed it until his death in 1995. At the same time, he acts as chief editor for the scientific journal Agressologie (1958‑1983), which he also founded. In the following, I shall explain some of the most important ideas Laborit put forward throughout his life, ideas that are profitable for the purpose of the present discussion.

If we traditionally consider the absence of a central nervous system as the reason why plants entirely depend on their ecological niche, animals, on the contrary, and more specifically human individuals, for what concerns us, are characterized by the necessity to act upon their environment to favour homeostasis (or the stability of their organism). Behavioural biology and neurophysiology have demonstrated that an individual’s general pattern of action is oriented in function of its research for gratification. One’s behaviour is driven by what is called in neuropsychology “mnemonic artefacts” (or engrams); these artefacts are as many cyphered biological traces of one’s passed experience inscribed in his limbic system – the system that dominates affectivity and plays a predominant role in the establishment of the long-term memory. Since we know the importance habitude has in Charles S. Peirce’s theories of interpretation, we can only recognize the pertinence of conjoining semiotics and biology, for the latter indicates that it is effectively the long-term memory that allows the repetition of pleasant experiences and the flight from, or avoidance of, the unpleasant ones in the process of interpreting the environment – a process that serves for all practical purposes the stability of the organism.

Yet, as soon as 1970, Laborit formulates what he calls “the environmental paradox of the contemporary man”. In La nouvelle grille, he writes:

The yoke of prohibitions, hierarchies, and social structures, inhibiting any gratifying activity, is never as heavy as in our actual industrialized countries’ urban societies, because flight is impossible. That is probably why it is within those societies, governed by the sole notion of production, where man is nothing but a machine that produces merchandises, that aggressiveness and violence, gratuitous in appearances, are most frequently observed. (1986a: 76)[1]

Indeed, on a macrospecific scale, mutual avoidance – a primitive behavioural reflex that can be observed in practically all animal species – is proscribed by the nature of the social contract that links us, civilized humans, nowadays. If anxiety essentially results of the impossibility for one to realize a gratifying behaviour (to flee or avoid an unpleasant experience), the simplest reaction to discharge that anxiety seems to adopt an aggressive attitude (Delgado 1967) – that is, after all, what most mammals do. Thus, we must acknowledge that what seems to be peculiar to human beings, what fundamentally distinguishes us from all other animal species, is our ability to flee in the imaginary, into the realm of imagination, rather than systematically show aggressiveness (Laborit 1970; 1995). This imaginary presents itself under an indefinite variety of forms, some fleeting, other lasting; they all contribute to play, but the lasting ones in particular support and ceaselessly erect higher and higher the narrative building our History relies on – comprising all the narratives that constitute it, whether they be documentary or fictional. The most ephemeral of these forms are expressed by spontaneous child play: without any prior rules, they live and die and leave no traces but those consigned by personal experience.

Now, let’s see how this flight in the imaginary works, by which means we can say that it is indeed peculiar to the human species and, finally, what is its influence on our games.

The inhibition of action

A rat placed in a cage and subjected regularly everyday over a short period of time to electrical discharges that cannot be avoided will soon develop the reflex to inhibit itself: because it knows it cannot avoid this torture, the rat will not try any action (fight or flight), but rather wait for this bad treatment to end. “When action is impossible, Laborit writes, the inhibition of action still allows to survive. Because it evades destruction, the entropic levelling with the environment.” (1986b: 1) But this inhibition – and the “psychosocial stress” that causes it – does not allow the organism to evacuate the effects of the unhealthy violence imposed by the environment. Thus, inhibition can be considered at the origin of diverse pathologies, of which signs appear progressively in the individual: “…we cannot find lesions due to a direct action of an aggressive agent. The lesions will often appear over a more or less long period of time and will be secondary to the reaction.” (ibid: 21) It is in this sense, Laborit suggests, “that ‘disease’ in all its forms can be considered as a lesser evil, as a delay given to the organism before its disappearance.” (ibid: 1)

Now, let us consider this second experiment. Two rats placed in the same cage, subjected to the same treatment previously described, rather than inhibiting themselves, will fight and, as soon as the electrical discharges stop, will cease fighting. The stress induced can therefore be evacuated in time for the rats to avoid any internal lesions in the long term. We can see in this laboratory experiment the birth, in short, of our modern tournaments and competitions, which for all purposes canalize aggressiveness in a cathartic fashion. The general oppression undergone in consequence of a maladaptation to the environment, or unhealthy social pressures, precipitates the action, and through it the research for gratification that maintains homeostasis. And so, play could be seen as a sort of “reaching out”, or a “grasp” attempted by the organism to cope with undue pressures coming in from its environment. Put simply: the organism reacts to external constraints in order to maintain its integrity. Action is realized within space, or spaces, Laborit reminds us.

However, if the same space if occupied by other individuals who are also in search for gratification with the same objects and the same beings, it will result in the immediate establishment, by struggle, of hierarchies. On the top of the hierarchy, the dominant one who can gratify himself will be non-violent, tolerant and in biological equilibrium, at least as long as his dominance is not contested and once the period of the establishment of its dominance is through. The dominated ones on the contrary, by activating their system of inhibition of action, which is their only mean to avoid punishment, will experience anxiety. (ibid: 173)

The first disposition to consider, thus, is not one that is strictly speaking inherent to play, but one that rather relies on the relationship organisms endowed with a central nervous system can maintain with their environment: those, to which we unquestionably belong, are disposed to play (in its primitive and aggressive forms at first, for sure, but these primitive forms lead to an open space of possibilities) – play is at their disposition and, seizing it, they regulate themselves. But is fighting a game? Yes, because there are rules.

Play, imagination, fiction: the flight and the frame

Because play imposes a set of rules distinct from those imposed by the sociological reality, and because play imposes borders, delimiting and defining it, to enter into play (in‑lusio, illusion) is a flight from reality, a flight into the sphere of the imaginary. As Roger Caillois wrote in Man, Play and Games: “All play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion […], then at least of a closed conventional, and, in certain respects, imaginary universe.” (2001: 19) In play, “fiction, the sentiment of as if, replaces and performs the same function as do rules.” (ibid: 8) Thus we are led to recognize the second disposition of importance, inherent to play this one: play imposes, for the apprehension of reality, a specifically fictional modality. This frame of apprehension can be adopted consciously, unconsciously, or nesciently. The flight outside of reality or, to be more precise, the flight into a reframe taking place within reality, the involvement in play, is motivated by the fact that play is structured, unlike the frame fled, “by precise, arbitrary, unexceptionable rules that must be accepted as such.” (ibid: 7) Indeed, Johan Huizinga writes: “No scepticism is possible where the rules of a game are concerned, for the principle underlying them is an unshakable truth.” (1950: 11) Nevertheless, many games do not imply objective, or previously fixed rules. We need only think about child spontaneous pretend-play, or animal play (although in the latter case we can wonder if the rules are not merely inaccessible to us). In some particular cases, we are led to believe that fiction alone imperiously stands for the rule. Caillois is categorical: “Rules themselves create fiction.” (2001: 8) But the opposite is true as well: fiction creates its own set of rules. Lev Vygotsky (2002) observed that there is no such thing as a no‑rules game: “It seems to me that one can go even further and propose that there is no such thing as play without rules and the child’s particular attitude toward them. […] All games with imaginary situations are simultaneously games with rules, and vice versa.” One could always argue that a flight into a reframe of reality is not an actual flight, but more of a partial flight, some might even say it is a mere metaphor; but for all practical purposes, there is no other kind of flight. This flight allows to operate a shift from one interpretative sphere to another, thus changing the relation of an individual to the world, which becomes the relation of a player towards play, of a character towards fiction.

Symbolic thought and the principle of reality

The animal, and human alike, feeds on prejudices and judgments: “It acts upon the acquired experience of what is favourable and what is unfavourable. It obeys its impulses and learning of reward and punishment.” (Laborit 1986b: 206) Any organism is a reservoir of dispositions that govern its actions. These mechanisms are constitutive of our representations of reality – a reality defined by Laborit as a complex ensemble of entangled relations, an ensemble we cannot grasp due to the “narrow filter of our senses”, which does not allow us to apprehend more than “a subset of the ensemble of relations [,which] is immediately deformed by our previous experience, pleasant or unpleasant, in response to our fundamental needs or acquired needs and our affectivity, coming in from socio-culture.” (ibid: 206) This narrow image of the world that is ours, phylogenetically and affectively determined, is the only one that is meaningful to us: it solely motivates our action.

Animals and humans are equally subjected to this law of nature; the Umwelt of an organism corresponds to its own reality. What distinguishes the latter, however, is that human adds to the prior factors of impulsiveness and gratification two other factors of no less importance: symbolic language and imagination. “We know that language involves neuronal circuits, the operation of which unconsciously associates nervous automatisms, [and] these associations […] enable the creation of extremely rich and varied ‘linguistic’ structures.” (ibid: 206) By juxtaposing: 1) the combinatory nature of grammar, and 2) the (unconscious and affective) associative aspect of the imagination in human, Laborit hypothesizes a motivated origin for our language – a motivation from which, little by little (and necessarily), we would have parted to the profit of abstraction. For Laborit, the emergence of symbolic language (and thought) is concomitant to the formation of abstract, conceptual worlds that can superimpose the reality construed on the sole perceptual and sociocultural factors. And “socioculture”, in return, is extensively enriched by the input of the symbolic thought:

It is this construction of an abstract world that Man could realize with language, a world of relations and no more of objective images. While the animal also constructs ‘models’ of the world where it lives and without which it could not act, those are models of images, and not conceptual models. Indeed, the animal constructs models because, like any living system, it knows and memorizes, out of the whole that constitute its environmental niche, only an extremely limited subset of relations, but a subset that still enables it to act, that is to protect its structure. But these relations remain adherent to the images, to the elements of the objective structure that accompany them. What man does in addition to that, through language, is to take distance towards the object and its image to handle only the relations that then constitute the elements of the imaginary ensemble. Thus results of this property, owed to the richness of the associative areas of the human brain, the possibility to create new structures. Man adds information to the world environing him, and because of this added information its action can transform this world; it shapes it.

Hence, the process of imagination essentially consists in the functional association of neuronal circuits retaining memorized experiences, and in associating them in a way that differs from the one strictly imposed by the environmental experience. (ibid: 207)

Thomas Sebeok and a natural history of language

The same year Laborit published L’inhibition de l’action (The inhibition of action), Thomas Sebeok published a paper entitled Toward a Natural History of Language (1991). In this paper, aside from a few details, Sebeok formulates the exact same theory as Laborit did, but rather than from a neurological and behavioural analysis frame, he chose to explain the emergence of language from an anthropological and phylogenetic point of view. In this paper, Sebeok stresses that because bipedalism, developed by Homo habilis about two million years ago, implies the possibility for Man to stare at the horizon, those two factors combined (bipedalism and the long-range vision) most probably favoured the emergence of planning thinking, and with it, the development of a new conception of time that made possible the invention and use of a complex linguistic syntax as well as material tools designed to be used in a foreseeable future.

Following the ecological theory stressed by the French geneticist François Jacob, stating that unless the correspondence between external reality and the self-world model (or Umwelt) of a given species is not sufficiently precise that species is doomed to extinction, Sebeok upholds for the human species a precise and deterministic distinction among the animal realm:

While all speechless creatures, as Jacob emphasizes, must model their universe, in order to survive, in fair conformity to “what is really out there” – this is, in the end, the deep meaning of the notion of an Umwelt – humans have evolved a way of modeling their universe in a way that not merely echoes “what is out there” but can, additionally, dream up a potentially infinite number of possible worlds […]

This kind of capability is achievable solely by means of a language, such that sentences in that language can be decomposed and recomposed in an indefinite number of ways (given a sufficient number of pieces to start out with); we can do this because all our natural languages possess […] a syntactic component.

By means of such a syntax, we can construct numberless novel narratives, imagine many versions of the past and construct as many future scenarios (including those of our death and afterlife), lie, frame scientific hypotheses […], including hypotheses about language itself, create poetry – in short, build a civilization. (1991: 72)

What would essentially distinguish the human species, then, is its capacity to conceptualize and use the conditional verbal form, which allows us to adapt to an indefinite variety of circumstances that can therefore be anticipated. “No other animal, so far as we know, has language in this sense,” Sebeok concludes (1991: 72). The conditional verbal form, which entails the possibility to posit non-actual states of affairs (counterfactuals and possible worlds) in diverse syntactic forms, constitutes a definition a minima of what Laborit calls the imaginary.

I shall now summarize what has been proposed hitherto. The imaginary, which we must at once associate with play in its simplest and most fundamental expression – the manipulation of concepts —, is primarily defined by one’s capacity to create new structures, to add information to its surrounding world, to shape it and transform it. Therefore, play is quintessentially performative. The three dispositions of play, then, are as follows: 1) play is a factor of homeostasis; 2) play entails fiction; 3) play is performative, and this is why, precisely, it is a factor of homeostasis. Play regulates the individual somewhere between boredom and anxiety. Besides, it can provide a sort of feeling that is greatly rewarding: fun. One could ponder this feeling is the minimal requirement to make sense out of this world.

Taking in account this new undertanding of the phenomenon, I think it would be interesting to conclude by discussing the symbolic nature of play, which rely on its mimetic character.

Play, mimesis, and performance

Huizinga’s thesis in Homo Ludens is a radical one: “Play is older than culture […] Human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play.” (1950: 1) Often called into question subsequently, this vision of play cannot be falsified, obviously, but it nevertheless remains a rich methodological hypothesis – and one that is coherent with the deterministic vision of Laborit. Just like Rousseau’s myth of the noble savage, Huizinga indulges in the musement of the origins:

Archaic society, we would say, plays as the child or animal plays. Such playing contains at the outset all the elements proper to play: order, tension, movement, change, solemnity, rhythm, rapture. Only in a later phase of society is play associated with the idea of something to be expressed in and by it, namely, what we would call “life” or “nature” […] but the primary thing is and remains play. (ibid: 17–18)

Only in this second phase envisioned by the author does play become transitive, mimetic. Indeed, for Huizinga, even if the play-world solely forms a totality, a closed reality in itself, play action remains fundamentally transitive; its end is to be found elsewhere. Play happens as a function of something else, it must be related to some biological necessity, Huizinga stresses (ibid: 2, 7), though without defining those ends.[2] After Laborit, I shall stress that play happens as an expression of the need for flight and, because it is symbolic, it takes part in the construction and the enrichment of abstract conceptual worlds by which human individuals act upon their environment. Therefore, it is fundamentally performative.

Nevertheless, it is the mimetic aspect of play that fascinates Huizinga the most. This specific aspect of his theory deserves a very special attention, because it presents itself under the canonical (and vulgar) form of the sign in the Latin rhetorical tradition: something stands for something else – aliquid stat pro aliquo. In other words, the meaning of play is to be found elsewhere than in its practical manifestation. “The game ‘represents’ a contest, or else becomes a contest for the best representation of something,” Huizinga writes (ibid: 13). “At the origin of the word ‘imagination’, there is image,” Laborit reminds us (1986b: 206). To represent is to show, to give to the senses – to give what? an image – through play; that is, a representation of the self as a player, or a representation of the world as play lets us see it through the subjectivity of a player. This conception of play as mimesis, and of mimesis as performance through play, harks back to a very ancient discussion, which in the last 50 years or so has been the object of a renewed interest following the success of the speech act theory and of performance studies. In its introduction to the 1984 Mimesis in Contemporary Theory, a multi-author book he edited, Mihai Spariosu emphasizes:

Before the fourth century B.C. the word mimêsis appears very rarely in connection with the arts, let alone “philosophy.” The idea of art (in the modern sense) as mimesis, which might have been connected with a special kind of drama (mimos) mentioned by Aristotle, was certainly not raised to the status of theoretical principle before Plato and his pupil. Moreover, mimesis as imitation in the liberal arts seems to have been a late development of the concept, if we are to believe Hermann Koller: originally, mimeisthai had the Pythagorean sense of Darstellung or Ausdrucksform (performance, form of expression) and was strictly associated with dance and music, being only later interpreted by Plato as Nachahmung (imitation) and (mis)applied to poetry, painting and philosophy. Thus the original meaning of mimesis may have been close to what Heidegger and Fink call the “ecstatic play of the world,” which is the opposite of imitation, and any discussion of mimesis will also have to imply a discussion of the concept of play in our culture. (1984: iii)

This surely provides a telling argument to dismiss the detractors of play, those who consider play as a waste of time, as an unproductive activity. Play is definitely transitive, therefore its action is never limited to the sphere of play itself – despite what appearances let us think sometimes (but then again, not all variants of play are to stand on an equal footing). Besides, Spariosu’s philological argument also seems to favour Huizinga’s hypothesis of play as the origin of culture in our human civilization.

The ecstatic play of the world

By now we have reattained the old debate that links play to representation in the arts. If I took the time to fully share Spariosu’s long quote, it is obviously because I am enraptured by this view of mimesis as performance, of which the origins are to be found in the non-figurative arts (music and dance), and further upstream, in the Hindu spiritual tradition. As Spariosu again wrote in The Wreath of Wild Olive, “myth will incessantly create history and history will incessantly create myth, until they both melt into what the Hindus call lila, or the ecstatic play of the world, in order to be born anew.” (1997: 209) Yet we are gone elsewhere, in some cosmic considerations.

References

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DELGADO, J. M. R. 1967. Social rank and radiostimulated aggressiveness in monkeys. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 144, 383–390.

HUIZINGA, Johan. 1950. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

LABORIT, Henri. 1970. L’agressivité détournée : Introduction à une biologie du comportement social [Diverted aggressiveness: Introduction to a social behavioural biology]. Paris: Union Générale d’Édition, 1970.

LABORIT, Henri. 1986a [1974]. La nouvelle grille [The new grid]. Paris: Gallimard.

LABORIT, Henri. 1986b [1979]. L’inhibition de l’action : Biologie comportementale et physio-pathologie. 2^e édition revue et augmentée [The inhibition of action: Behavioural biology and physio-pathology. Second edition reviewed and enhanced]. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

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SEBEOK, Thomas A. 1991. A Sign is Just a Sign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

SPARIOSU, Mihai (ed.). 1984. Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Volume 1: The Literary and Philosophical Debate. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

SPARIOSU, Mihai. 1997. The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press.

SUTTON-SMITH, Brian. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

VYGOTSKY, Lev. 2002. Play and its role in the Mental Development of the Child (1933). Translated by C. Mulholland; transcription/markup by N. Schmolze. Online version : Psychology and Marxism Internet Archive (marxists.org).