Rule of the Game

Definition

The rule of the game is Baudrillard's name, across Fatal Strategies (1983), for the arbitrary convention that reorganizes appearances — the artificial code that allows things to be linked "fatally" rather than causally. "To circumvent the circuits of causality, arbitrary signs must be projected, some kind of arbitrary codes, which is what the rules of a game are." The rule is what the world's secret organization runs on: "This is the basic rule of the game, and God himself is subject to it." It is contrasted with law and meaning: "the law inscribed in heaven is not at all one of exchange. It's rather the pact of alliance and seductive connections"; "not a system of values or interpretation: a system of rules." The rule governs the ceremony, the gift, the duel, and the Witz: "There is a fundamental, secret rule, an enigma; nevertheless, the whole process is no mystery; nothing is more intelligible than a game in progress." It is the formal category the whole book opposes to both causal necessity and statistical chance: "Things would then neither be linked according to law, nor free and indeterminate according to chance, but reversible according to the rule." See ceremony-of-the-world, appearance-and-disappearance, seduction, destiny.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "a system of rules"; "God himself is subject to it"; "reversible according to the rule" (1983).
• Georges Perec — the wiki's Oulipian theorist of generative rules and constraints (a kindred register).
• Rachel Carley — the design-theoretical transposition of the rule/constraint into spatial practice.
• Johan Huizinga (if paged) — Homo Ludens, the play-rule tradition.

Related Concepts

• The Ceremony of the World — the rule's ritual unfolding.
• Appearance and Disappearance — the rule regulates the cycle.
• Seduction — the duel and the pact as rule-bound games.
• Destiny — "reversible according to the rule."
• Voluntary Constraints — the rule in design/teaching.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — "The Fatal, or, Reversible Imminence" and "The Ceremony of the World": "arbitrary codes… the rules of a game"; "a system of rules"; "the pact of alliance and seductive connections."
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• This page is a stub awaiting fuller treatment; it should be connected to the wiki's play, constraint and Oulipo materials.