The Intrusion of the Playful

The theories of the apparatus conceive, in art, the possibility of a playful détournement of technics. For T. W. Adorno, this is an “antithetical demand for irresponsibility¹” which awakens the playful element and without which “neither art nor theory can be conceived².” The injunction to play advocated by Adorno is thus associated with cognitive stakes, which are particularly interesting when art mobilizes increasingly opaque technologies.

For his part, in a more figurative way, Vilém Flusser sees in the figure of the “apparatus-equipped” artist that of the player who struggles with his apparatus with no other aim than to defeat it. In Pour une philosophie de la photographie (1983), Flusser explains what he means by “apparatus”: “an ‘apparatus’ would be a thing held in readiness and lying in wait for something […]. Photographing: that is what the camera lies in wait for, and in view of which it sharpens its teeth³.” In contact with the artist, the photographic apparatus⁴ takes part in a game with two possible outcomes. If the photographer lets himself be dominated by the logic inherent in the technological dispositif, art will be absent: the image generated will express above all the functioning of a techno-economic program⁵ that solicits the photographer as if he were a “functionary⁶” compelled to press the button in order to generate a redundant, non-informative image⁷. On the contrary, when the photographer manages to circumvent the conditionings inherent in his apparatus, “non-redundant” images can emerge from artistic creation. We thus find in Flusser, just as in Adorno, a justification of the playful in its capacity to produce formal entities bearing a surplus of information.

Jean-Louis Déotte develops and generalizes the entertaining and playful aspect that Flusser and Adorno attribute to the act when the artist negotiates with his technological means. For Déotte:

most of the apparatuses invented at the heart of modernity belong rather to the playful, to the “playable”: they are accessories of human pleasures, whose birthplace is neither the workshop nor the laboratory, but the fairground booth⁸.

Déotte builds the notion of apparatus on the basis of an interpretation of the notion of dispositif in Foucault, but in response to the latter’s inability to “account for the power of appearance and of creation⁹.” For Déotte, the suspension of the logic of the dispositif leaves room for the expression of the apparatus¹⁰, which prepares the ground for the emergence of the event, the latter being constitutively “unpredictable¹¹.” If there is a form of “rationality” of the apparatus in Déotte, it is not governed by economics or instrumental efficiency; it would rather be a playful logic, for the apparatus “owes its appearance to the pleasure felt by homo ludens¹².”

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, op. cit., p. 65-66.↩︎

2. Ibid.↩︎

3. Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, op. cit., p. 28.↩︎

4. On the basis of the link between the photographer and his camera, Flusser develops a reflection that can largely be generalized to all the “apparatus-based” arts.↩︎

5. A techno-economic program materialized in his camera.↩︎

6. Let us underline here Flusser’s Kafkaesque tone.↩︎

7. Vilém Flusser, Pour une philosophie de la photographie, op. cit., p. 34.↩︎

8. Jean-Louis Déotte, L’époque des appareils, op. cit., p. 179.↩︎

9. Denis Skopin, ”La notion d’appareil chez Jean-Louis Déotte et le dispositif foucaldien,” in Appareil, op. cit.. In this sense, we could say that what we are trying to delimit as theories of the apparatus are modes of thought inspired by Heidegger and Foucault, but which, in a more optimistic spirit, seek to problematize the setting up of ”apparatus-based” creative processes.↩︎

10. Déotte is the only one, among the thinkers who interest us here, to have established a clear differentiation between the notion of dispositif and that of apparatus.↩︎

11. Jean-Louis Déotte, «La révolution des appareils ». Lignes [en ligne]. April 2001, vol. n° 4, n° 1, p. 61–67.↩︎

12. Ibid.. Déotte mobilizes the figure of Homo ludens, dear to Johan Huizinga in his 1938 essay on the social function of play.↩︎