Randomness

Life itself is full of randomness and the inexplicable, and it is no small wonder that children and adults alike incorporate chance into their daily lives, as if to tame it. Games of chance are one of the four fundamental categories of games that all humans play, argued the French cultural historian Roger Caillois. Whereas ''agon'' are competitive games dependent upon skill, ''mimicry,'' games of imagination, and ''ilinx'' are games causing disorder and loss of control, ''alea'' are games of chance. Craps, roulette, the lottery -- these are games in which the outcome is unpredictable, seemingly random. Taken from the Latin name for dice games, ''alea'' "negates work, patience, experience, and qualifications" (17). All is dependent upon "luck." There are no assignable causes.

In his ''Arcades Project'' on 19th century Paris, Walter Benjamin devotes an entire section to dice games and gambling, a curious assemblage of notes and extracts with sources ranging from Casanova to Friedrich Engels. "Gambling," Benjamin quotes Anatole France as saying, "is a hand-to-hand encounter with Fate" (''Arcades'' 498 [O4A]). Every spin of the roulette wheel is an opportunity to show that fate smiles upon the player. Fortunes rise and fall in the blink of an eye, the roll of the die, or the cut of the cards. Every gambler knows this and accepts it and even relishes it.

<blockquote>Hurstwood watched awhile, and then, seeing an interesting game, joined in. As before, it went easy for awhile, he winning a few times and cheering up, losing a few pots and growing more interested and determined on that account. At last the fascinating game took a strong hold on him. He enjoyed its risks and ventured on a trifling hand to bluff the company and secure a fair stake. (374)</blockquote>

What is intriguing about Dreiser's account is that it is only when Hurstwood’s good fortune wavers that his interest in the game grows and he begins to enjoy it. Losing a few hands makes a winning streak all that much more thrilling. "A series of lucky rolls gives me more pleasure than a man who does not gamble can have over a period of several years," brags Edouard Gourdon in one sexually-charged extract in the ''Arcades Project''. "These joys," he continues, "vivid and scorching as lightning, are too rapid-fire to become distasteful, and too diverse to become boring. I live a hundred lives in one" (''Arcades'' 498 [O4a]).

Unlike the early, purely malevolent associations of randomess described in the introduction to this chapter, randomness here is masochistic interplay between pleasure and pain. As well, there is a monumental compression of time: a hundred lives in one. Anatole France calls gambling "the art of producing in a second the changes that Destiny ordinarily effects only in the course of many hours or even many years" (Arcades 498 [O4A]). Benjamin himself declares that "the greater the component of chance in a game, the more speedily it elapses" (512 [O12a,2]). In other words, time accelerates during the high stakes game of chance. Waiting, boredom, monotony -- these frustrations disappear as "time spills from his [the gambler's] every pore" (107 [D3,4]).

Perhaps Benjamin describes games of chance with a bit more whimsy than is useful for critical discussion of the role of randomness in culture. It's important to remember that although words like randomness, chance, and uncertainty may be casually interchanged, not all forms of chance are the same. To highlight distinctions between various forms of chance, consider the anthropologist Thomas Malaby's account of gambling in a small Greek city on the island of Crete -- an appropriate site of exploration, given ''alea'''s Greek etymology. Malaby’s goal is to use gambling as a "lens through which to explore how social actors confront uncertainty in…key areas of their lives" (7). How do people account for the unaccountable? How do we deal with the unpredictable? And what are the sources of indeterminacy in our lives?

Malaby presents a useful framework for understanding indeterminacy, based on four categories. The first category is ''formal indeterminacy'', what we commonly refer to as chance. This is any form of random allotment, which often can be understood and predicted through statistical methods. Malaby argues that the ascendancy of statistical thinking in the social sciences has skewed our conception of indeterminacy in gambling (in particular) and in our lives (in general) so much that formal indeterminacy has become a stand-in for other types of indeterminacies. The second category is ''social indeterminacy'', which is the impossibility of knowing or understanding someone else’s point of view or intentions. A bluff is a type of social indeterminacy. The third category is ''performative indeterminacy'', that is, the unreliability of one's own or of another's actions, say a fumble in football game or misreading the information in plain view on a chess board. Finally, the fourth category described by Malaby is ''cosmological indeterminacy,'' which refers to skepticism about the fairness and legitimacy of the rules of the game in the first place at a local, institutional, or cosmological level. Suspicion that a game is “rigged,” for example, is a cosmological indeterminacy (Malaby 15-17).