Ceremony and Performative Utterances

The above cover photo is from Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir

Theory Part 1: An Incantation Question

This is something new I've been building out. The idea itself is old, very very old, probably as old as just about any idea out there. Ceremony. As humans, we've been holding ceremonies for a long long time, likely at least as long as we've been humans. It might be something we learned from some hominid cousins, so perhaps even before we were humans. The practice of turning ceremony into a playful thing is newer, maybe. I say maybe, because perhaps the earliest ceremonies were really just folk goofing off, and then later it became all weird and serious. Reach back into our human past and things get muddled. Did we play with creating ceremonies before we had ceremonies? How much earlier were we playing at making magic before the first spell was cast? Possibly the tooth went under the pillow first, and then only slowly, bedtime by bedtime and fang by fang, the fairy took shape, then she flew, and finally, left her first gold coin.

I wonder when we first incanted and what it was that we were trying to incant. Did it work? Does it still? If it didn't, can it now? If it did, can it still? What were they trying to incant? What should we be incanting now? I wonder about the achievements of the past and the actualities of the present. I wonder what our earliest incantations were, why they changed, how they will keep changing. I wonder what I should be incanting. 

But mostly, I wonder how to incant. Nothing happens for a reason, but in how it happens, there is something fun.

Theory Part 2: Performative Utterances

Certain words function like magic incantations. These are words which, by being said, do a thing. Some academic folk have recently realized the funny richness of these words and come up with the idea of "performative utterances." A classic example comes from the preamble to the US Constitution in the words “ordain and establish.” We want to promote the general welfare and all that shit, and thought of a way to organize a government to do all this, and we wrote this thing explaining it all, but it’s still just descriptive. Then comes the preamble. "We hereby ordain and establish," and all this is given effect. It becomes. This utterance is performed, and it then becomes.

There are other examples of words that perform through being uttered: swear, promise, christen, affirm, authorize, bless, dedicate. As they are spoken, they do. Most words like this are legal or religious, or are rooted in legality and religion, but you and I aren't confined so.  

Looking and thinking about these words reveals something funny about meaning, something that people strangely don’t seem to notice, and something that I only noticed recently. It’s this: meaning is only about language. We look for meaning in life, and expect to see great beauty or justice or hope or connection or history in the answering. These things are of course good, but they aren’t meaning per se. So what the hell is the meaning of “meaning”? 

Meaning is the relationship between a word and the thing it refers to. Nothing more.

We can expand a little bit past the relationship between word and referential, and ask what a sentence means, or a gesture, or maybe a painting, or a dance, but have to be careful going too far. The less tangible the signifier gets, the less tangible the thing being signified gets. Ask me what a book means. The inquiry is beautiful and useful, but inaccurate. Perhaps I could tell you the meaning of a crappy book, but a good book has many many meanings, all of them elusive. A good book can teach us about justice and beauty and hope, but it doesn’t actually mean these things. Interesting things don't actually mean anything. They can bring us to an experience that feels meaningful

Method

The premise of this game is simple: take something that you need blessed or incanted or conjured, then make up an incantation or magic spell or conjuring or ceremony, and then build out what you think the utterances performs or what the performance utters. 

Step by step and rule by rule, build out what you want to turn into magic, then put it into a magic word, then write the word on paper or in chalk or scream it or whisper it, then translate it into movement, then many movements, then back into word, then back into your magic hope, and see if you understand your hope better, and then through the cycle again, and maybe, eventually, something is ordained and established.

Ceremony. Create a little magic ceremony.

*A little reminder about what a friend said about "Kelping", a thing that we did during a nickname creation game, and how we could then bring that fun movement pretending to be kelp to have us freeze and get a bit more grounded (or "oceaned" perhaps), because he said he somewhat needed it, the game creation was much more intellectually taxing than he expected. A thing can happen in a session and come to signify something, and we can recognize it and use it, and make it into a little ceremony. This has to happen in naturally in the playing, but I think I can prime players to be aware of this kind of thing.