Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T07:22:50.928Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Roger Caillois, Games of Chance and the Superstar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Loek Groot
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois's book, Man, Play and Games, to compare the mechanisms underlying the superstar phenomenon with a special kind of game, as set out by Caillois. As far as I know, Caillois's book is not quoted in the literature dealing with income distribution theories, although the comparison with play and games is, for limited purposes, interesting. In play and games we find almost all elements which play a role in theories of just income distribution: equality of opportunity, chance, talent, competition and skill, reward, entitlement, winners and losers, etc. These are not chance similarities, for “… games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practised. They affect their preferences, prolong their customs, and reflect their beliefs … One … can … posit a truly reciprocal relationship between a society and the games it likes to play”. Moreover, as we will see, superstars combine the four basic characteristics of play that make their activities a special kind of play.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 48 , Issue 190 , June 2000 , pp. 33 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2000

References

Notes

1. Roger Caillois (1967). Les jeux et les hommes: Le masque et le vertige, revised and enlarged edition. Paris: Gallimard, First published in 1958. [English translation: (1962) Man, Play and Games. London: Thames and Hudson. Two articles by Gaillois on this subject appeared in Diogenes in 1955 and 1959. Revised versions of these articles were integrated as chapters in the book.

2. Caillois (1962) op. cit., 82.

3. Johan Huizinga (1938). Homo ludens: proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink. [English translation: (1949) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

4. Caillois (1962) op. cit., 5.

5. Ibid., 6.

6. Ibid., 45.

7. Ibid., 12.

8. Ibid., 27.

9. "… [T]he ambition to win by one's own merit alone in regulated competition (agôn), the submission of one's will to anxious and passive anticipation of the decree of fate (alea), the desire to assume a strange personality (mimicry), and, finally, the pursuit of vertigo (ilinx) … the desire temporarily to destroy one's bodily stability and equilibrium, escape the tyranny of one's ordinary perception and prompt the suspen sion of one's usual consciousness": author's translation of Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, 102-3, adapted from Man, Play and Games, 44.

10. Caillois (1962), op. cit., 87.

11. Ibid., 158.

12. Ibid., 160.

13. Michael Young (1962). The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033: An Essay on Education and Equality. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

14. Author's translation of Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, 217-8, adapted from Man, Play and Games, 112.

15. John Rawls (1999). A Theory of Justice. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 266. [First published in 1972; the revisions were first incorporated into the German translation of 1975 and included in subsequent translations: see revised edition, xi.

16. In the section ‘Further Cases of Priority', Rawls states that "an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunities of those with the lesser opportunity". In Rawls (1999), op. cit., 266. That is to say, fair equality of opportunity is the difference principle operated on the sum of opportunities.

17. Ibid., 87. Rawls observed, shortly before this passage, "Thus the [difference] principle holds that in order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions". Ibid., 86.

18. Salient in this respect is that Rawls thinks that the combined impact of the principle of equal opportunity and the difference principle can prevent the occurrence of superstar incomes: "While nothing guarantees that inequalities will not be significant, there is a persistent tendency for them to be leveled down by the increasing availability of educated talent and ever widening opportunities. The conditions established by the other principles insure that the disparities likely to result will be much less than the differences that men have often tolerated in the past" Ibid. I do not think that superstar incomes can be eliminated or reduced by providing greater equality of opportunity or by increasing the fairness of competition for number one positions. The extraordinary high earnings are the result of the absolute scarcity of number one positions, and the greater the number of competitors, the more desirable it is to become the winner: for more detailed argumentation, Borghans L. and L. Groot (1998). Superstardom and Monopolistic Power: Why Media Stars Earn More Than Their Marginal Contribution to Welfare. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 154 (3), 546-71.

19. Caillois (1962), op. cit., 112.

20 Rawls (1999), op. cit., 64.

21. Caillois (1962), op. cit., 115.

22. Author's translation of Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, 209-10, adapted from Man, Play and Games, 108.

23. "Submission to what is decided by lot is agreeable to these indolent and impatient beings whose basic values are no longer operable." Caillois (1962), op. cit., 146.

24. Ibid., 110.

25. Author's translation of Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, 235-6, adapted from Man, Play and Games, 121.

26. Caillois (1962), op. cit., 120. "They feel, despite everything, that they are represented by the manicurist elected Beauty Queen, by the sales girl entrusted with the heroine's role in a super production, by the shopkeeper's daughter winning the Tour de France, by the gas station attendant who basks in the limelight as a champion toreador." Caillois (1962), op. cit., 121.

27. See S. Rosen (1981). The Economics of Superstars. American Economic Review, 71, 845-58, for a definition of superstars: The phenomenon of Superstars, wherein relatively small numbers of people earn enormous amounts of money and dominate the activities in which they engage, seems to be increasingly important in the modem world … In certain kinds of economic activity there is concentration of output among a few individuals, marked skewness in the associated distributions of income and very large rewards at the top."

28. In Borghans and Groet (1998), op. cit., it is argued that superstars earn more than their marginal contribu tion to welfare justifies.

29. Caillois (1962), op. cit., 122.

30. Ibid., 118.

31. To give a telling example, Adler has shown that the superstar phenomenon can emerge even without differences in talent or performance. The crucial assumption is that consumption (e.g of music or literature) is at the same time a learning process. This means that the degree of satisfaction increases with greater acquaintance with the artist or genre, and that the choice of an artist or genre depends on their fame and publicity. Because of this formation of consumption capital, it is rational to restrict oneself to a few artistic genres and a few artists. If everyone chooses a different genre or artist, mutual discussion and information transfer is impossible, whereas if many people make the same choice, search and learning costs can be reduced. And these costs are minimized by choosing the most popular artist: "To re-emphasize, to star need not possess greater talent. Stardom is a market device to economize on learning costs in activities where ‘the more you know the more you enjoy'. Thus stardom may be independent of the existence of a hierarchy of talent" (Adler, 1985: 208), Carrying this argument to the extreme, it is entirely a matter of chance, not of talent or effort, to become the superstar: "First, bills of all colors could serve as money and likewise all [i.e., any of the] artists could be stars. Second, efficiency calls for only one money and likewise efficiency calls for very few artists with public recognition … If there were a slight majority of consumers that picked X as their choice, X would snowball into the star because after each period this majority would increase" [ibid.: 211]. This adequately illustrates the importance of alea in becoming a superstar.

32. For a meritocrat, the superstar may get the first prize, but it does not follow that there should be only a first prize or only a few big prizes. Even if the rewards are distributed top-down, then alea (the radicality of natural and social contingencies) has still enough scope to play its complementary role in relation agôn.

33 Rawls (1999), op. cit., 274.