https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4739-2358
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ABSTRACT
Play and its material-semiotic configurations are being acknowledged more and more as creative and formative forces in socio-cultural spatialization. However, subject-centered epistemologies of the roles of materiality and the thing still haunt perspectives on play. This theoretical article critically approaches and reevaluates the concept of ‘playfulness’ via affect theory in a relational ontology of play. Thinking of playfulness as a relation between bodies, things, and ideas gathered as ‘play partners’ which co-enable each other’s capacities for play evades viewing it as a causal mental state of the subject or a mere outcome of play as a practice. Rather, drawing from Lugones, playfulness can be grasped as a differential, pre-individual type of spatializing affect which is primary to play. Finally, thinking with the recent series How to Build a Sex Room, the theoretical account links to a reading of the agency of playful things in the real-and-imagined spaces of sex, kink and BDSM.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Sicart writes that the ‘ecology of play is constituted by the elements that form the context of play: all the agents, situations, spaces, times, and technologies involved in playing’ (Citation2014, pp. 43–44). Context in Sicart is a strong but also vast concept defined as ‘the network of things, people, and places needed for play to take place’ (p. 7). It does link play back to its situatedness in the world but, particularly in Play Matters, it remains open how things in play come to be relevant beyond the ‘users, who are in charge of making them meaningful’ (p. 31).
2 Schiller’s God-subject is defined by a disposition to divinity: ‘Man irrefutably carries the disposition to the divinity in his personality; the way to the divinity, if one can call a way what never leads to the goal, is opened to him in the senses’ (Citation2000, p. 45; my trans.).
3 Schiller first distinguishes between two drives, ‘two fundamental laws of sensual-reasonable nature’ (Citation2000, p. 46; my trans.), the sensual drive and the form drive: ‘the first demands absolute reality: he is to make everything into the world that is merely form, and to bring all his dispositions to appearance: the second demands absolute formality: he is to annihilate everything in himself that is merely world, and to bring conformity into all his changes; in other words, he is to externalize everything internal and to form everything external’ (p. 46; my trans.). Play is introduced as the mediating drive between the two: ‘The play instinct would therefore be directed to suspend time in time, to reconcile becoming with absolute being, change with identity’ (p. 57; my trans.).
4 ‘Ipse fecit’ (literally: Latin for ‘she/he did it her or himself’) or ‘i.f.’ can be found together with the signature of the artist on many pieces of art as testimony of authorship.
5 In Schaller, play is primarily ‘an inner mental process, a peculiar state of mind’ (Citation1861, p. 9; my trans.). In Freud, the child’s impetus for play is related to the repetition compulsion (see Citation1967, p. 21). Apter, also thinking of play as ‘a state of mind,’ holds that ‘it is impossible to define play from the outside’ (Citation1991, p. 13).
6 The structural phenomenologists Apter and Kerr, for example, treat play as ‘a state of mind’ (Apter, Citation1991, p. 13) and speak of the ‘dominance’ of meta-motivational states (such as play) within individuals ‘if the individual is predisposed to spend longer periods in this state than in the other member of the pair which they constitute. It implies that there is an innate bias in the individual in favour of one state rather than its opposite, although this may be obscured by environmental influences’ (Kerr & Apter, Citation1991, p. 182). While the idea of a capacity to play is certainly not unproductive itself, the quote already shows the severe danger of reading the environment as merely ‘obscuring’ the inner bias as ‘true’ origin of play which essentializes the very processual dynamic element (the fluidity of experience via the switching of frames) the theory deserves credit for.
7 Her starting point for the concept of ‘travel’ is rooted in the experience of outsiders to the dominant culture(s) in a society who are always already in a position in which it is necessary to acquire flexibility for navigating different ‘worlds’. Her concept of a ‘world’ relates to actual societies (including their imagined parts) from either a culturally dominant description, a non-dominant or even idiosyncratic constructions of it (see Citation1987, pp. 9–10). As an account of world-travel, the essay conceptualizes a failure to love (arrogant perception) closely to a ‘failure to identify’ (p. 7) with another person (from a different ‘world’) which again is tied to the inability for or lack of playfulness and loving perception. The latter, Lugones argues, can be fostered by turning world-travel into a willfully sought-out experience with the Other in their ‘world’. As the self can be thought as a ‘plurality’ (p. 14), her concept of travel is tied to an ontological ‘shift’ (p. 12).
8 Given the overall impetus of her essay, such sentences like ‘Lack of playfulness is not symptomatic of lack of ease but of lack of health’ (p. 14) can be read as pointing to this ‘lack’ as a matter of relationality in power-charged dynamics which produce alienation and arrogant perception between positions in different worlds. In this manner, the strong emphasis on the subject her account sometimes relies on could be read as an awareness of the intricacies of positionality which often appear as tied to a personal biography (her inability to love her mother) rather than part of a wider social formation. The very structure of her essay attempts to unite both in the latter half’s rethinking of play and playfulness.
9 There have been other authors in play theory who have argued for a primacy of playfulness before Lugones. What has kept playfulness from attaining a more prime position in the thinking on play was its conceptualization as a subjective frame of mind. Schaller, e.g. described it as an ‘inner, mental process’ which ‘produces play’ (Citation1861, p. 9; my trans., emphasis added).
10 See her emphasis on the primacy of the attitude in the following example: ‘We are by the river bank. The river is very, very low. Almost dry. Bits of water here and there. Little pools with a few trout hiding under the rocks. But mostly is [sic] wet stones, grey on the outside. We walk on the stones for awhile [sic]. You pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and it is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that there is something like ‘crashing stones’ that is a particular form of play with its own rules. Rather the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play’ (p. 16, emphasis in original).
11 Affect theory is generally linked to two strands: (a) Spinozist theory of affect via later interpreters such as Bergson and Deleuze and (b) affect theory tied to psychologist Tomkins (Citation1963) and later developed further by Sedgwick Kosofsky (Citation2003). In the following, I will mainly draw from the first branch of theory (for a general overview over the historical contexts of affect theory see Wehrs (Citation2017); for the more recent theoretical positions grouped together under the term ‘affective turn’ see Tricineto Clough and Halley (Citation2007); for a more overtly practice-theoretical discussion of affect see Wiesse (Citation2019)).
12 This notion contrasts with approaches to affect which primarily consider them as inner states, emotions or feelings without necessarily having to ignore these phenomena as part of affective dynamics (as they are experienced and later described by human bodies via language). For a discussion of the relation of the two contrasting notions see Sharma and Tygstrup (Citation2015, pp. 7–8).
13 Spinoza describes affections as ‘modes with which the parts of the human Body, and consequently the whole Body, are affected’ (Citation1985, p. 470). By mode, he understands ‘the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived’ (p. 409) which immediately ties the being of a body to all other bodies which affect it. The bodies in question, however, are more-than-human bodies: ‘whatever we have said of the idea of the human Body must also be said of the idea of any thing’ (p. 458). Furthermore, affect is both tied to embodied experience and mental relations, i.e. ideas: ‘The human Mind does not know the human Body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the Body is affected’ (p. 466). Here, Tomkins’ (Citation1963) classification of different basic affects already differentiates according to separate types of feelings which are postulated as universals which Spinozist accounts of affect do not necessarily hold to.
14 See: ‘By affect [affectum] I understand affections [affectiones] of the Body by which the Body’s power [potentia] of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ (Spinoza, Citation1985, p. 493). See beyond Massumi’s reading of the terms in Deleuze and Guattari: ‘Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection (Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies)’ (Citation2019, p. xv, emphasis in original).
15 Both sides together form the two poles of Deleuze’s affection-image, in which the face is the close-up (in that it has both, a reflective side and a motor tendency, i.e. wonder and desire; see: Citation1997a, pp. 90–97).
16 In addition to Spinoza’s close coupling of bodies and ideas detailed before, Williams’ essay Structures of Feeling gives an account of affect in which these categories blur: ‘We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process [. . .]’ (Citation2015, p. 23).
17 Here, thinking play from a relational ontology opens up the possibility of rewriting one of the dominant play theories originated in Schiller which has described play as a surplus of energy. If said surplus of energy is understood as a part of an equal but asymmetric affective encounter, Spencer’s ‘overflowing energies’ (Citation1906, p. 629), Schiller’s ‘abundant power’ (Citation2000, p. 115; my trans.), and Groos’ ‘sense of comfort’ (Citation1898, p. 9) are indeed important to conceptualize the initiation and the processual nature of play.
18 Lefebvre’s differentiation of space as ‘perceived’, ‘conceived’, and ‘lived’ leads him to acknowledge space as always already mediated, thus fundamentally beyond a distinction of ‘nature-culture’, and ‘real-imagined’ (see Citation2012, pp. 83–84). From a practice theory perspective, too, the mental, the idea, and the imagined are to be thought as not just major but necessary components of social practices as the latter are ‘sets of routinized bodily performances, but they are at the same time sets of mental activities’ (Reckwitz, Citation2002, p. 251, emphasis added). Drawing from those lines of thinking, ideas in play theory cannot (and should not) be placed ‘objectively’ in space. From a relational point of view, however, ideas do have a diffuse but material and socio-cultural ontology in the world.
19 Haraway, again, inspires as a ‘grammatographist’ for rethinking play relationally (i.e. beyond the usual subject-verb-object-structure). Hopeful travel in my sense is close to her notion of ‘going visiting’, which entails ‘to venture off the beaten path to meet the unexpected [. . .], and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met. This is what I have called cultivating response-ability’ (Citation2016, p. 130).
20 Note that ‘kink’ and ‘BDSM’ are by no means discrete categories. The acronym ‘BDSM’ is usually split up into the pairs of BD (bondage and discipline), DS (play with domination/submission), and SM (consensual experiences of sadism/masochism). ‘Kink’ is framed as an umbrella term in opposition to ‘vanilla’ practices, preferences, and identities (i.e. those closer to an imagined ‘norm’). Sometimes the inclusive acronym ‘WIITWD’ (‘what it is that we do’) is used in the attempt to account for the entirety of sexual, kink, and BDSM practices. Here, both ‘BDSM’ and ‘kink’ are used together to achieve greater inclusivity of sexual experiences and without either thinking of them as deviations from a norm or as superior with regard to non-kinky sexuality and practices. Note also that my use of sexuality is meant to include a-sexual and non-sexual positions and experiences which may very well be part of ‘kink’ practices without necessarily emphasizing the traditional ‘sexual’ connotations as such.