111.
Heterotopias of luxury, of a strictly artificial necessity, contain subdivisions of play and game, existing within their allotted times and spaces, which are in turn subdivided. The space of play contains separate worlds of literature, art, theater, cinema, even spaces for sexual play — as Foucault discovered in San Franciso. These are now just ‘special topics’, ruled off from any larger ambitions for remaking the world. Aesthetic play tried again and again to break out of its heterotopia, to take the derangement of the senses into the streets, and again and again it failed. Guy Debord: “For Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it, and Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it. The critical position since worked out by the Situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.” It was not to be. The heterotopian space of the art world abolished Debord’s Situationists instead by realizing ‘Situationism’ entirely within the confines of the playpen of art history.
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What is missing in Caillois, and what the situationists (and Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Krakauer) can offer here is the sense of space, in particular in the city as field, setting and component of game. Psychogeography, like our use of the mobile phone (amongst other media and vesicles) offers a way to “ground” play and create a nascent game space. This fits into the idea of athletic play and spot which we see expressed through the Paris suburbs as Parkour or in the myriad forms of “streetball” (be they stick, basket or foot).
The America chapter was attemtping to offer a sort of conceptual history of gamespace, in part derived from the WB and the SI
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