In light of the discussion going on over at On the Assembly of Things between Chris Kelty, Steve Collier and Lyle over the distinction between Bell Curves and Power Laws (and the implication of this distinction for our understanding of biopolitical formations), I’m also forced to rethink the discussion we had last week which was instigated by Mark.
We were thinking of the ways in which we could use multi-dimensional analysis and I (mostly faciously) brought up the example of Backgammon (“There was a lot of backgammon playing in my ‘field’. Could I discover that something similar was going on in person X, Y and Z’s fieldsite?”) in order to make the case for this usage of our multi-dimensional capability.
I’d just like to point out, I guess, that there was in fact a lot of backgammon playing in Paris in general (and the police in particular), as well as another game, 4-21, which also uses normalizing probablistic logic. Now, this was interesting enough for me because it was often during these games that I had conversations about “hazzard,” “coincidence,” “destiny,” and even “synchronicity”. But now reading Chris’s post, I want to see what other games are being played in the fieldsites we’re talking about…
