The temptations associated with the huntsman's achievement of strategic consciousness lie in the capacity to extend an invisible hand into the distant world, and dispassionately observe the effects of will upon that which feels its movement but not its intent. The goal of the strategist is to produce bafflement amongst the strategised - he wills that they cannot comprehend what has hit them.
The strategic element of hunting emerges from the development of a capacity for prediction - there is a science in it and also an art. Strategy is a semi-autonomous apparatus of consciousness that is moved out into the world, and lain over it, it is comprised of planning and realisation. It is not driven by hunger but by the semi-idle desire to watch a plan work itself out in the exterior. It is a heuristic that, in this case, once triggered, reaches its end with the fainting of the fox, as a football match finishes with the satisfyingly final flourish of a whistle. Kaltarys allows for a demonstration of mastery beyond, and even in spite of, the use-function of hunting - it is supremely demonstrative of the principle that cruelty only really begins in the distance created by games (and on that basis, the potential for mercy also begins in that moment).
The powers of prediction only take on significance in circumstances where outcomes may be identified but are not certain. In Ismailov's version of kaltarys, a prediction is made, one of his characters, Grandad Daulet, tells how the moments of the hunt will follow each other, and this is confirmed by actual events. Prediction is a skill that extracts one particular outcome in advance from a set of variable inputs that otherwise suggest the possibility of a range of alternative outcomes. Clearly, prediction also involves intervening to the maximum possible extent within the process, including the manipulation of significant variables, to ensure the predicted result.
Similarly, other sports also depend upon the coding and containment of types of predictable events within a set of rules. The function of rules in sport is to facilitate the isolation, identification and perfection of permitted variables from the background noise of 'all possible events'. Sporting participants are judged according to the fidelity with which they perform the classical movements of their sport, and also upon how they are able to improvise upon, and find space within, the rules (without breaking them).
In cricket, the rigid containment of an asymmetrical game within 42 laws encourages both classicism and the type of technical improvisations that remain within the letter of the law without the improvisers ever identifying with its spirit. Technical improvisation relies on a capacity to introduce difference in detail whilst assuming this will not crash the system by which it is contained. It is not a coincidence that most innovation in cricket emerges from out of post-colonial teams: Franklyn Stephenson's slower ball; the reverse swing of Waqar Younis; Saqlain Mushtaq's doosra; Ajantha Mendis's carrom ball; M.S.Dhoni's Helicopter shot; Virender Sehwag's upper cut; Mohammad Mushtaq's reverse sweep.
Similarly, in other fields, mastery of technique precedes technical innovation where this performs a protective function and channels the release of built-up energy. The innovative technician, like an owl quartering (Kaltarys) its territory at dusk, turning the listening disc of its face towards a potential breakthrough, falls upon its prey with the full optimisation of available force (the barn owl hits a vole with a force of something like 12 times body weight (a descent of 5m/second) - the equivalent of a 12 ton truck hitting an 80kg man). In philosophy, a skilled practitioner can hit a concept with similar force, Zizek for example is as skilled in his way as Waqar Younis is in his. In both cases, however, the innovation remains within the field of constraints and ensures the maximal utilisation of the life-world's available resources.
Predictablity belongs to the controlled space where the combination of variables is artificially constrained to a minimum but where any looked-for outcome of that combination retains enough uncertainty to interest the gambler. But every field of expertise is an island surrounded by otherwise incomprehensible inputs. The controlled space of a life-world is itself contained within concentric circles marking the staged increase in complexity of relations and the random events generated from them. The penetration of the sporting field by fragments of the primum mobile, or outermost ring of chaos, radically re-situates the insularity of cultural activity (just as if the rehearsal of a set of rites associated with the worship of God suddenly had to be performed before God's amused and sceptical gaze - just as if God briefly wakes, opening an eye, and sees, really sees, what his worshippers undertake in his name).
There is a point reached in the developmental trajectory of every social formation where the familiar calendar of its customs is reflected back in an entirely alien and unrecognisable form - it is then that the world becomes both unknown and unpredictable. Suddenly, those who had previously lived so immersed within their culture that they could not even conceive it as a 'culture', so immersed within it that it was 'the', and not merely 'their', life-world, must now begin to perform before others those gestures that are attributed to them. The event where a culture must perform itself, as if before others, in relation to strangers, marks a transition from an earlier state of the way of things, from sheer this-function of the life-world, to a represented role, to a set of traits and marks by which they are known in an other world, those possessions that must be held onto for the reason that they have already been lost.
The performance of the self before others becomes a performance, as if from a position outside, before oneself. Those who once did not even know they belonged, find themselves now not belonging in relation to their own habits, the ubiquity of which they previously could not have imagined exceeding. The death of culture is located in its conscious reproduction as a set of motifs, that which must be defended and preserved is already dead - 'then, deluded with a shew of the Forbidden Tree springing up before them, they, greedily reaching to take of the Fruit, chew dust and bitter ashes.'
To perform innocence, to represent the pristine, breaks a hitherto unsuspected 'fourth wall'; to perform one's self before oneself as if to an unknown audience, is to taste the ashes of humiliation and dislocation. First the territory migrated north, the earth beneath our feet. Then, everything attached to the earth began sliding away, moving upwards, caught in the swirl, all of it in a great tide, flowing north. At last, the lines of the gone world tightened, and pulled the hooks in our flesh, pulling us away and towards we know not where.
Meteorite-like fragments of the primum mobile are introduced into culture by the most insignificant and wretched of agencies. If sports stars demonstrate their prowess by improvising within the rules of their sport, the autonomous values of the sport-world itself are cracked open by the arrival of a monster, a stranger, one incapable of comprehension of what it is at stake. The hunting scene in The Dead Lake is disturbed by one such figure, the Bulgarian violin teacher (and alleged paedophile) Petko who, utilising his privilege as guest, requests that the hunters spare the life of the captured fox. The introduction of a clumsy form of mercy at this point, is an unexpected and unprecedented outcome of kaltarys, which takes all the hunters by surprise. By activating an external value system via the traditional channels of host and guest conventions, Petko also fatally introduces a contaminating germ into his hosts' world. The inadvertent disruption of a life-world's metabolism by inexplicable, cosmic forces is the wider theme of Ismailov's book. 'Traditions' is another word for radiation sickness.
Reference:
The title from 'The hand as being' by Wallace Stevens
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20308483-the-dead-lake
