Anny Dargis > Anny's Quotes

“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Only that which can change can continue.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out-- when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”
― James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary, but travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them. The motels around the airports in Chicago and Atlanta are so little different from the motels around the airports of Tokyo and Frankfurt that all essential distances dissolve in likeness. What is truly separated is distinct; it is unlike. "The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes" (Proust).”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“In the complex plotting of sexual encounter it is by no means uncommon for the partners to have played a double game in which each is winner and loser, and each is an emblem for the other's seductive power.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The strategy of infinite players is horizontal. They do not go to meet putative enemies with power and violence, but with poiesis and vision. They invite them to become a people in passage. Infinite players do not rise to meet arms with arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision, and surprise to engage the state and put its boundaries back into play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Infinite speakers do not give voice to another, but receive it from another. Infinite speakers do not therefore appeal to a world as audience, do not speak before a world, but present themselves as an audience by way of talking with others. Finite speech informs another about the world-for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other-for the sake of listening.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“I can explain nothing to you unless I first draw your attention to patent inadequacies in your knowledge; discontinuities in the relations between objects, or the presence of anomalies you cannot account for by any of the laws known to you. You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Gardeners slaughter no animals. They kill nothing. Fruits, seeds, vegetables, nuts, grains, grasses, roots, flowers, herbs, berries-all are collected when they have ripened, and when their collection is in the interest of the garden's heightened and continued vitality. Harvesting respects a source, leaves it unexploited, suffers it to be as it is.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Gardening is not outcome-oriented. A successful harvest is not the end of a gardener's existence, but only a phase of it. As any gardener knows, the vitality of a garden does not end with a harvest. It simply takes another form. Gardens do not "die" in the winter but quietly prepare for another season.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“It is, therefore, this fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“It is not a matter of exposing one’s unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“It is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Because it is address, attending always on the response of the addressed, infinite speech has the form of listening. Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker. It is not a silence into which speech has died, but a silence from which speech is born.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If as a people infinite players cannot go to war against a people, they can act against war itself within whatever state they happen to reside. In one way their opposition to war resembles that of finite players: Each is opposed to the existence of a state. But their reasons and the strategies for attempting to eliminate states are radically different. Finite players go to war against states because they endanger boundaries; infinite players oppose states because they engender boundaries.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies. "Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object" (Rousseau). For infinite players, if it is possible to wage a war without killing a single person, then it is possible to wage war only without killing a single person.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The danger of the poets, for Plaot, is that they can imitate so well that it is difficult to see what is true and what is merely invented. Since reality cannot be invented, but only discovered through the exercise of reason-according to Plato-all poets must be put into the service of reason. The poets are to surround the citizens of the Republic with such art as will "lead them unawares from childhood to love of, resemblance to, and harmony with, the beauty of reason."

The use of the word "unawares" shows Plato's intention to keep the metaphysical veil intact. Those who are being led to reason cannot be aware of it. They must be led to it without choosing it. Plato asks his poets not to create, but to deceive.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets-that is, creators of all sorts-seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets-that is, creators of all sorts-seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Since machinery requires force from without, its use always requires a search for consumable power. When we think of nature as resource, it is as a resource for power. As we preoccupy ourselves with machinery, nature is increasingly thought of as a reservoir of needed substances. It is a quantity of materials that exist to be consumed, chiefly in our machines.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Since a flourishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threatening to make the society's own habitation into a wasteland.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as waste, and as our waste. If waste is the result of our indifference to nature, it is also the way we experience the indifference of nature. Waste is therefore a reminder that society is a species of culture. Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also plainly see that society is only what we want it to be.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility