Five Points on the Relation of Playing Cards to Life

The first task of discussing the relationship between cards to life must commence at defining what a ‘card’ is…

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Regardless of it’s materiality, a card could be more broadly defined as a fragment of information removed from its context. When you think of it, any isolated thing that holds information (perhaps physically smaller than a typical letter sheet of paper) is seen as a “card”. This distinct ability of the cards to isolate themselves is a key feature of the medium. For example, it is only because of the playing card’s ability to be fragmented from the rest of the deck that it holds any playing value at all. The state of fragmentation of the cards are what give them the ability to be ordered and re-ordered within the greater structure of the deck. 

I. ORDERED AND DISORDERED

Similar to life, a deck of cards can only ever be in two states: ordered or disordered. However, cards rarely exist in their ordered state. When we discuss “ordered state”, this means the state of the cards when you first open a fresh deck: all of the suits are organized together and are in numerical “order”. The few moments when a deck of playing cards is first opened is one of the only times in the deck’s existence where the cards live in their ordered state. The reason we don’t often keep playing cards in their numerical order or grouped within their suit is that the only way cards derive playing value is how well they are shuffled. It is in this shuffled state that all potential possibilities for the subsequent game arise. For this reason, many games’ objectives is to use the theoretical, ordered state of a deck of cards as a goal to work toward. 

The value of a deck of cards comes from the countless potential states that emerges from the inherent chaos of the deck.

Similar to life, we enter life in a chaotic state of being and we move through life seeking this order. However, the only reason life has any meaning at all is because of this chaos we are trying to regulate. Only once we accept the nature of the game can the purpose be revealed and results be obtained.

II. MEANING AND PERSPECTIVE 

One interesting premise of cards is that they hold within them several dimensions simultaneously. When playing a game, the cards take on different meanings, which are then able to affect the person playing them instantaneously. For example, an ‘8’ in any suit in the game of crazy 8s’ is the highest value card in the deck, but in its regular ordered state, this would be unexpected. Even still, when you draw an 8 while playing crazy 8s’, it feels like its high value is objectively true, as you have been completely subsumed by the rules of the game. In this sense, playing with a deck of cards is an inherently aesthetic experience. Like beauty, this instantaneous affect does not require any cognitive function on behalf of the user, the card just is as dictated through whatever lens the game is giving you. 

Any card in a deck can essentially hold any possible value, it just depends on the rules of the game. Change the rules, change the meaning. As a player of the game, you lose sight of the virtually infinite different meanings the cards are able to hold simultaneously. All you are doing is playing the game and the physical cards themselves recede into the background.

This interesting property about the medium of cards is that they can bring truth to the ways these premises work in the external world with other objects or immaterial structures humans create. We often forget about the background rules and regulations that are imposed on the world that create instantaneous affect: whether it be a physical reaction or immaterial thoughts. For example, the colours of traffic lights that regulate the road or even language itself. These types of value structures based on relationships and adjacencies rather than universal truths is very relevant to the ways ideologies functions rhetorically in the quotidian life.

Change the rules, change the meaning. Cards are paradoxical in this sense, as it proves that you can create “something” infinite (in this case, meaning) out of a finite set of materials. 

III. THE ACE AND VALUE STRUCTURES 

Cards’ values are nonlinear. Spatially, you can only arrange their value in a circle. This phenominon is because of the magical ‘Ace’. The Ace is simultaneously the lowest and highest value. In this sense, numerically there is no beginning nor end to a typical deck of cards’ value structure. It is a circle.

This value structure is similar to the hermetic law of polarity; that there is no such thing as opposites, but only two ends of the same thing. In this sense, the Ace is nothing and everything; zero and infinity.

This paradoxical meaning of the Ace is an akin to the symmetrical relationship of zero and infinity, where zero represents nothing and infinity represents everything. While they could be considered “opposites”, they infact have a deep equivalency when looked at mathematically. For example, they are both symmetrical states in that every change leaves them unchanged. 100 times zero is zero, and 100 times infinity is still infinity. 

These similarities were obvious since the Renaissance, but mathematicians had to wait until the end of the French Revolution before they finally unraveled zero’s big secret.

Zero and infinity are two sides of the same coin — equal and opposite, yin and yang, equally powerful adversaries at either end of the realm of numbers. The troublesome nature of zero lies with the strange powers of the infinite, and it is possible to understand the infinite by studying zero. To learn this, mathematicians had to venture into the world of the imaginary, a bizarre world where circles are lines, lines are circles, and infinity and zero sit on opposite poles. 
— Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

The Ace is like the magical