The Philosophy of Play as Life

Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall, Malcolm MacLean, Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall, Malcolm MacLean

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367247515
• eBook ISBN: 9781315454115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

It is now widely acknowledged that play is central to our lives. As a phenomenon, play poses important questions of reality, subjectivity, competition, inclusion and exclusion. This international collection is the third in a series of books (including The Philosophy of Play and Philosophical Perspectives on Play ) that aims to build paradigmatic bridges between scholars of philosophy and scholars of play.

Divided into four sections (Play as Life, Play as Games, Play as Art and Play as Politics), this book sheds new light on the significance of play for both children and adults in a variety of cultural settings. Its chapters encompass a range of philosophical areas of enquiry such as metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics, and the spectrum of topics explored includes games, jokes, sport and our social relationship with the Internet.

With contributions from established and emerging scholars from around the world, The Philosophy of Play as Life is fascinating reading for all those with an interest in playwork, the ethics and philosophy of sport, childhood studies or the philosophy of education.

Part I

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Play as life

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Chapter 1

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Bringing play to life and life to play

A vitalist line of enquiry

Stuart Lester

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This essay continues an ongoing analysis of Deleuzian/new materialist/posthuman philosophy and associated applications (Lester, 2013, 2016a) that offer a different way of accounting for play. It pursues a related line of enquiry to (re)position playing as the process of life going on in an affirmative manner (Lester, 2016a). Of necessity, it will re-play some of the key ideas from preceding explorations in order to give more attention to the ways in which bodies, symbols and materials are always entwined in a trajectory of becoming. From this perspective, becoming is not the progressive formation of an ‘ identity’, which is prefigured and unfolds over time or some transcendent state of affairs (from child to adult) but the process of continuous differentiation. It marks a vitalist philosophical position concerned with the unceasing power of life going on. This is not a form of vitalism that proposes there is a superordinate mystical or spiritual life force that can never be known but rather, following Deleuze (2004), puts sense (impersonal, inorganic, multiple and mobile) before meaning: ‘organisms are possible because they actualise or incarnate sense, and sense is pure potentiality’ (Colebrook, 2010: 4). Thus, for example, a perception of nonsense or disorder would imply an absence of order, but as Colebrook (2010: 178) explains ‘it is just this non-fit between perception and perceived that opens up a positive domain of sense; for the order that is not perceived is what allows me to view the scene before me as disordered’. It is only through the imposition of an ideal image of order that a distinction between order and disorder can be made. Sense marks a pre-personal and pre-conscious stance of resistance to fact- and meaning-based analysis by holding off the common-sense language relations of denotation (comment), manifestation (interpret) and signification (reflect) that close down events with their respective truth claims (Deleuze, 2004).

The process of playing is much more extensive than what it produces; the making of play is always bigger than what is made and as such requires a different set of conceptual tools that work with formation rather than forms. To this end the chapter will consider Deleuze’s application of Simondon’s (1992) concept of individuation and the cartographic approaches of Deligny (2015) to suggest that life possesses a vital tendency towards dis-organization, and playing is an exemplary process that actualizes the creative desire that makes life possible.

An opening example – walking the lines

An example is introduced at this stage to offer a ‘remarkable point’ (Manning, 2013) for what follows. In developing this, there is an opening nod to Deleuze’s relational concept of the virtual-actual and the ways in which form takes shape from the realm of possibilities that are ever-present. A remarkable point simultaneously contains what actually emerges and the ever-present potential this holds for further movement and transformation. The use of an example is important in this context, designed to introduce ‘playful and profane notions of difference and heterogeneity’ (Koro-Ljungberg and Barko, 2012: 258). A specific example cannot be evaluated and represented against a unity to reveal a universal and stable reality; it can only stand for itself. However, the detailed exploration of the intensive and extensive affects and movements that collude to produce a distinct occurrence can activate the emergent relationality of each event. This chance observation reveals the following:

There are large square floor tiles in the main entrance to the museum. A young girl is carefully balancing along the grooves between the tiles in a seemingly random fashion. A short while later another girl joins in, setting her own pattern of movements. As they pass each other, the new arrival turns to the first child and says, ‘What happens if you fall off?’

(Lester, 2015: 4)

The details of this singular moment contain both the unique quality of this formation and a prospective movement; who knows where this might next lead? In this example, the children rarely make eye contact with each other but their movements resonate; bodies, lines between tiles, the general ambience and so on are attuned and sensitive to subtle vibrations, colluding to produce an event that is always open to further possibilities for movement, i.e. continuing to sense the potential disorder present at this moment of time/space for becoming different. It is both more and less than the sum of its individual parts: it is more because the moment of walking the lines can only emerge from the free association or correspondence in-between materials; it is less because there is no single individual leading this spontaneous and unpredictable movement, nothing has prepared them for it and the ‘individual’ is put to one side as the mo(ve)ment¹ continues (Ingold, 2015).

For the most part, the study of play has been largely fixated with determining the identity of play and individual players, to represent, define and classify into exclusive patterns and products, and to reduce the flow of life to a utilitarian account in which the movement and trajectory of subjects is already pre-established (Lester, 2013). The example above might be classified as a moment of playing, tested against definitions, and meaning attributed to this form that would seek to reduce it to more of the same. It fixes movement to a point of representation that seeks to impose a beginning and ending that limit and immobilize the flow and generation of difference. Playing, as process, becomes overcoded by layers of meaning that stultify the emergent and indeterminate nature of playing, and indeed life itself. This is but a small part of a traditionally hegemonic accounting system that spreads across disciplinary fields to cut life apart into discrete orders, most prominently the culture/nature, mind/body binary with associated privilege afforded to the former of these terms (Lester, 2016a). It is a negating or oppositional process of differenciation by which work is opposed to play, adult to child, rational to irrational, and so on in highly complex and multiple forms to produce a subject that is fixed and self-enclosed.

While systems of logic and representation have their origin in animating life they come to operate outside of the conditions that brought them to life (Colebrook, 2010). The challenge is to extract, abduct or shamelessly poach concepts that are sensitive and faithful to the prevailing conditions of the example rather than overcode it (Massumi, 2002a). The concern here is not with the fixed identity of the real, their associated attributes and determinations by resemblance and opposition but with the processes that bring them into form; how do remarkable points emerge and take shape (the genesis of morphe) from the complex collusions of organic and inorganic material moving at different rates? It is here Deleuze’s process philosophy, notably the attention given to movements and their affects, enlivens existing ideas and creates new concepts that open up the possibility for thinking otherwise about playing and indeed life itself.

A life

Deleuze is renowned for changing terms across diverse writings and collaborations and few of the concepts have stable names. This is not simply to create an impression of difference but also to develop a series of different ideas around the same subject, ‘theories which are slightly displaced relative to one another but retain enough overlaps that they can be meshed together as a heterogeneous assemblage’ (DeLanda, 2002: 157). While concepts are creative, complex and dynamic, it is possible to discern the continuous pursuit of a univocal philosophy (Deleuze, 1994), i.e. a position that proposes that differences of matter are brought about and emerge in dynamic, indeterminate and complex ways without any necessary foundational differences of being. Life does not merely operate at the level of an individual organism (a presumed stable ‘being’) but emerges from the self-organizing capacities of organic and non-organic materials to co-create novel formations, a continuous and fluid state of becoming. Life, from this perspective, can be seen as a condition for action and movement, beings are always becomings and contain a collective freedom to flourish, expressed as the ‘ability to act and in acting to make oneself even as one is made by external forces’ (Grosz, 2011: 62). When taken with Barad’s (2007) concept of agency, it may be suggested that freedom, as with life itself, is not an individual affair but is thoroughly and intra-actively entangled in encounters in-between bodies, materials, imaginations and their affects. These entanglements may be more or less productive of a capacity to act to produce collectively desirable states of being.

Deleuze (2001: 29) notes that ‘a life is everywhere, in all moments that a given living subject goes through … an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualised in subjects and objects’. Life is always indefinite and pre-individual, always going on. This is one of the most profound concepts in Deleuzian ontology as it overcomes the idea that there are pre-existing forms, transcendent subjects, and original genesis. This is not some abstract, mystical notion of life but an impersonal life that endures through the real singularity of specific events. Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism frees life from impositions of internal/external, subject/object relations and forms to become subject-less and present in all things. Every phase of being is constituted by co-mingling dimensions of process:

• the pre-individual or virtual, sometimes referred to as a plane of immanence or consistency. In simple terms, it is the force of life or ‘desiring production’ that exceeds this life but cannot be experienced without it.

• intensive actualization that extracts the ‘real’. This is a process of differentiation or individuation by which ‘the given is given’ (Deleuze, 1994: 222). It implies movement from one state (immanence) to another (actuality).

• the ‘actual’, comprised of stratified human and non-human entities (a stratum with a unity of composition); it appears as a steady state that is often reinforced through classificatory practices that fix things into place as though they are the natural order and by doing so mask the processes that give rise to them, i.e. the ‘virtual multiplicities’ that are ever-present in a system and as such may be presented as ‘actual’ in themselves.

Both what happens and what might virtually happen (an endless plane of potentiality) are real; ‘the virtual is a univocal plane of past, present and future, the totality of all that is, was and will be’ (Colebrook, 2002: 1). From this perspective, the individual is ‘more-than’ (Manning, 2010) what it appears to be, it exists in a state of metastability, an apparent stable being that is barely stable and perpetually susceptible to becoming unstable at any moment (Combes, 2013).

It is important to retain the idea that actualities are effected from potentiality rather than the other way around. This counters hylomorphic accounts of life in which there is a presumed and pre-existing external agent that imposes form on matter through a process of differenciation (Colebrook, 2002; Simondon, 1992). On Deleuze’s plane of consistency there are only complex networks of forces, ‘relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 23–4). Life is not between matter and form but between materials and forces. It is this productive movement, the processes of mixing and melding, that is of interest in this chapter. The intention is to insinuate playing with those forces that bring life into being, to follow these flows to see where they might lead and what can be created.

Individuation

And so the question is not what does life mean, but how does a particular moment of life, what might be termed ‘reality’, come about; how is this actuality produced from a limitless field of virtuality and how might it be produced differently? For Deleuze (1994), drawing particularly on concepts from Gilbert Simondon, the actual is produced through individuation or intensive morphogenetic processes that move a state of virtuality (plane of immanence) across a threshold to actuality. Individuation is a process of ontogenesis, bringing forth forms in an emergent manner rather than being given in advance. Thus, for example, the process of neurogenesis is not an unfolding of predetermined and sequential stages of growth but a complex and dynamic process of self-organization. In very simple terms, the neuronal structure of a brain is a virtual field, a plane of immanence in which each individual neuron (among the billions present) has a potential that becomes actualized ‘through significant morphogenetic movements: the augmentation of free surfaces, stretching of cellular layers, invagination by folding, regional displacement of groups’ (Deleuze, 1994: 214). In this sense, individuation refers to a constellation of processes that collude to foreground a singularity, or one measure of how the body expresses (Manning, 2013). As Simondon (2009: 5) comments, the individual should be:

grasped as a relative reality, a certain phase of being that supposes a preindividual reality, and that, even after individuation, does not exist on its own, because individuation does not exhaust with one stroke the pot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Play as life
• Part 2 Play as games
• Part 3 Play as art
• Part 4 Play as politics
• Index