Postures and the Image Game

 

I've been thinking about the image game again. Undoubtedly this is for my sins. 

The game players in the White City have several centuries of cultural experience to draw on in their play. This has lead to the development of a series of legible 'postures' that experienced players can identify and place in relation to one another. Sophisticated play involves both identification of postural switching, and also knowing when it makes sense to abandon a posture or scramble its legibility. Of course, since posture switching is relational and contingent on the play of others, doing this well is high-risk, and involves a degree of mutual pre-empting and strategising. Most players aver that this is best done via rational strategy and constant oversight of images produced (successful players often gather a 'staff' of sharp young proteges around them who take this role) - certainly this is the most straightforward way to play successfully. 

There are others though, whose focus is on the skin-felling of real-time intuition. The most celebrated are capable of intuiting the shifts in the game well in advance, sometimes so far in advance that they appear to be playing poorly in the present, only to be vindicated years or decades later. There is a category of player whose entire focus is on decoding the signals and images produced by these 'naturals,' and producing commentaries and analysis for general consumption by lower-skill players, who hope to glean something of the 'natural' genius and make use of it in their own play.

Naturals are a strange phenomenon. Since they lay claim to the future, none can truly say with finality whether they are playing successfully or not. Their playing is a matter of personal faith, and all successful naturals eventually develop a sort of psychotic, internal, steel-hard consistency in their self belief. Sometimes this is not enough, and they crumble - they are found to have been playing poorly the entire time. This happens all at once, in a reveal, and can have horrifying implications on the broader game. 

Rarely they are able to maintain their own holy insulation from the analysis, the critique, the gaze, and the desire of the rest of the city, and maintain the ambiguity in their play until the end. These are the most celebrated citizens of all, and often become images in their own right after death, deployed in the game as short hand for their own elaborate play in its entirety - its specificities will be entirely legible to any serious player who knows their history, and the particular flourishes and techniques layer on top of one another and result in richer and denser play as the years roll on.

Some theorists opine that the layering and recursion of the image game will eventually reach a density such that no individual posture will be discreetly legible. Naturals and their adherents laugh at this. What could be more flexible, more demanding, more generous, more fractally complex and multiform, than they player and the field? What could be more at home than the eye and the calculating mind that swim in micro-specificities of intuition, enunciation, of showing and obscuring?

There is not system that cannot be decoded and incorporated. There is no position that cannot be undermined and made use of. There is no image that cannot be turned into just more raw materials. 

Nothing adheres and nothing remains. 

If you would know the contents of my soul, study Paul Thek.