Philosophical Perspectives on Play

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

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317554301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation physique

Philosophical Perspectives on Play builds on the disciplinary and paradigmatic bridges constructed between the study of philosophy and play in The Philosophy of Play (Routledge, 2013) to develop a richer understanding of the concept and nature of play and its relation to human life and value. Made up of contributions from leading international thinkers and inviting readers to explore the presumptions often attached to play and playfulness, the book considers ways that play in 'virtual' and 'real' worlds can inform understandings of each, critiquing established norms and encouraging scepticism about the practice and experience of play.

Organised around four central themes -- play(ing) at the limits, aesthetics, metaphysics/ontology and ethics -- the book extends and challenges notions of play by drawing on issues emerging in sport, gaming, literature, space and art, with specific attention paid to disruption and danger. It is intended to provide scholars and practitioners working in the spheres of play, education, games, sport and related subjects with a deeper understanding of philosophical thought and to open dialogue across these disciplines.

Part I Playing at the limits

1 Exile and utopia as liminal play

A cultural-theoretical approach¹

Mihai I. Spariosu

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732213-2

In the past century, numerous studies have focused on exile and utopia as independent concepts, but have largely ignored the close correlation between them and have only rarely placed them in a general cultural-theoretical or philosophical framework. In what follows, I shall argue that what brings these two concepts together is the fact that they are both forms of ludic liminality. In order to support my argument, I shall first review the ways in which the concepts of play and liminality have been employed in cultural theory, as well as my own use of them. Elsewhere (Spariosu, 1997), I explore at length the relation between play and liminality in general. Here I shall briefly consider these two concepts in the specific context of their relevance to exile and utopia.

Play in contemporary cultural theory

In his classic study, Homo Ludens, Huizinga defines play as a ‘voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary” life’ (Huizinga, 1950: 13). Play is a ‘free’ activity not only because it stands outside ordinary life, but also because it is not connected with any material interest or work, and ‘no profit can be gained by it’ (Huizinga, 1950: 13). It is being carried out for the sake of pure pleasure and, although it is not ‘serious’, it absorbs the player ‘intensely and utterly’ (Huizinga, 1950: 13).

This general definition captures the essential features of play but also its highly ambivalent nature. Huizinga, like many other cultural theorists before and after him, invariably defines play as the primary or secondary term in a number of binary oppositions, such as play and work, play and seriousness, play and utility, play and reality, and play and culture. Within the concept of play itself, Huizinga and other scholars have generated such binary oppositions as play versus games, higher versus lower play, rational versus irrational play, violent versus nonviolent play, primitive or natural versus civilized play, true versus false play, fair versus foul or perverted play, and so forth.

For example, Huizinga states that ‘in the twin union of play and culture play is primary’ (Huizinga, 1950: 46), but then seeks to draw a distinction between primitive or natural play and cultural or higher play in terms of rationality and irrationality. According to him, the higher cultural forms of play are much easier to describe, whereas in interpreting the ‘more primitive play of infants and young animals’, one immediately encounters ‘that irreducible quality of pure playfulness’ which is ‘not amenable to further analysis’ (Huizinga, 1950: 7). For Huizinga, primitive or irrational play lies at the foundation of culture, but within culture itself, rational play gains primacy. In turn, by irrational cultural play he means first and foremost violent and/or destructive play, or what the ancient Greeks called violent agon (contest) or eris (competition).

A closer look, however, reveals that the distinction between natural and cultural play does not hold water, generating a number of ambiguities. These ambiguities become especially apparent when Huizinga attempts to present his cultural theory of play in historical terms. According to him, in the course of human history,

the play-element gradually recedes into the background, being absorbed for the most part in the sacred sphere. The remainder crystallizes as knowledge: folklore, poetry, philosophy, or in the various forms of judicial and social life. The original play-element is then almost completely hidden behind cultural phenomena.

(Huizinga, 1950: 46)

Thus, his concept of play becomes a ‘golden age’ fiction (a form of utopia) of the Totality of Being, from which culture perpetually regresses.

It is from the perspective of this golden age fiction that Huizinga carries out an extensive critique of modernity in ‘The play-element in contemporary civilization’, the last chapter of his book. According to him, contemporary culture, despite its emphasis on games and sports, has lost the ‘child-like’ quality of ‘original’ play. Among other examples, he mentions modernist art, which, despite appearances, has lost its play-quality, because ‘when art becomes self-conscious, that is, conscious of its own grace, it is apt to lose something of its eternal childlike innocence’ (Huizinga, 1950: 202).

On the other hand, elsewhere in the book Huizinga describes this pre-historical or ‘original’ play as being irrational and associates it with war and violence. Irrational play can reassert itself in history by arresting the same historical processes that it has initiated. As he puts it, ‘at any moment, even in a highly developed civilization, the play-“instinct” may reassert itself in full force, drowning the individual and the mass in the intoxication of an immense game’ (Huizinga, 1950: 47). In all likelihood, this is a veiled reference to the mass-intoxication of Nazi Germany, which Huizinga, however, roundly condemns at the very end of his study as false and perverted play. For obvious ideological and political reasons, he is reluctant to characterize the Nazi war ‘as a noble game’ (even though some of the Nazis themselves saw it that way).

Huizinga himself is aware of this contradiction. Yet, in typical modernist fashion, Huizinga tries to find his way out of this dilemma by falling back on the binary oppositions of play and seriousness, fair and foul play, disinterested and utilitarian play, thereby generating more ambiguities:

Only through an ethos that transcends the friend–foe relationship and recognizes a higher goal than the gratification of the self, the group, or the nation, will a political society pass beyond the ‘play’ of war to true seriousness. … Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoilsport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. … True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.

(Huizinga, 1950: 209–10)

Here, Huizinga privileges the rational concepts of play that have been operating in philosophy and cultural theory at least since Plato. In fact, the Dutch scholar clearly draws his inspiration from Plato's Republic and Laws, where Plato gives play a major role not only in the education of the citizens of his utopian State but also in his theology and ontoepistemology. Like Plato, Huizinga attempts to distill a ‘pure’ and ‘disinterested’, rational play out of violent contest and to separate it from the idea of power, even though he knows all too well that the archaic ludic concepts associated with war (as they appear, for example, in Homer's Iliad) are equally ‘pure’ and ‘disinterested’, being manifestations of power for its own sake (Spariosu, 1991: 28–40).

Nevertheless, to conclude my discussion of Huizinga's idea of play, I should like to point out that despite his theoretical ambiguities, his most important contribution to a theory of culture as play is to have drawn attention, in the wake of Nietzsche, to the fact that violent contest, such as war, is a favoured cultural form of play in Western civilization.

Indeed, one may add that power in general has always conceived of itself – and manifested itself – as a form of agonistic play. Furthermore, even though in the archaic period this agonistic ludic concept was unashamedly declared to be at the root of all culture (for example, in passages from Homer, Heraclitus, the Sophists and other Presocratics), it slowly became tamed and concealed under the veneer of rational, ‘civilized’ play to such an extent that the play concept itself has gradually become entirely separated from the concept of violent contest and power (Spariosu, 1991). Hence all of the theoretical confusions and ambiguities present in most, if not all, Western theories of culture as play ever since Plato.

Liminality and contemporary cultural theory

Like play, liminality has received an ambiguous treatment in Western thought, and largely for the same reasons. And like play, the concept of liminality has a long history within (and outside) Western civilization. In modern times, Arnold van Gennep (1909) was the first to employ the term in anthropology, in relation to the rites of passage characteristic of small-scale societies. According to van Gennep, a passage rite comprises three stages that the young initiand must successfully complete in order to become a full-fledged member of his community: the first stage involves the separation of the young man from his community; the second, or transitional, stage, which van Gennep calls ‘liminal’, involves the erasure of all social marks that may identify him as a member of his community; and the third stage involves his reintegration in that community (Gennep, 1909).

‘Liminality’, however, covers much more semantic ground than van Gennep's narrow, technical term seems to imply. Its etymology has a very long multicultural history, stretching over thousands of years: the word lmn (vocalized, e.g. in Hebrew as lmyn or lymyn) was already present in Mediterranean cultures (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic) in the early Bronze Age and originally meant ‘harbor’, that is, a place where land and sea meet (Lubetzki, 1979: 158–80). For thousands of years, harbors have been cosmopolitan places of intersection of various cultures and languages, where material goods and artifacts are exchanged alongside with ideas, customs, foods, religious practices and so forth.

In Latin, limes meant the borders or confines of the Roman Empire. In turn, limen meant ‘threshold’ or ‘passage’ denoting a space or place in-between. By extension, limen came to mean any transitional space, state, or situation and has given the term limbo (Latin, limbus) in Catholic theology; it is occasionally also associated with Purgatory and it means a ‘half-way station’ between Heaven and Hell, where the souls of those who died ‘in the friendship of God’ (such as many pagan philosophers) await salvation at the hands of Jesus Christ.

The concept of liminality is present in other religious doctrines as well, for example in the Pythagorean view of metempsychosis, that Socrates mentions in Plato's Republic, when the old sage recounts the myth of Er. According to Er, who was allowed to come back to the world of the living and report what he saw in the land of the dead, the souls of recently deceased people meet at a middle station, where they are allowed to choose their next lot.

A similar idea appears in Tibetan Buddhism, under the name of bardo, which signifies ‘gap’ or a space ‘in-between’. As Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche explains, bardo is ‘a kind of landmark which stands between two things’ and could denote the ‘experience that stands between death and birth. The past situation has just occurred and the future situation has not yet manifested itself, so there is a gap between the two’ (Trungpa, 1987: 10–11).

In turn, in the Zoroastrian faith, hamistagan denotes a transitional state, after death, in which the soul of a believer, who during his lifetime was neither good nor evil, awaits Judgement Day. Finally, the idea of liminality is equally present in Islam, where barzakh describes a transitional state between the moment of death and the day of resurrection, during which sinners are punished, while the righteous repose in peace and comfort. We can thus say with some confidence that this idea is universal, being present, explicitly or implicitly, in both large-scale and small-scale communities, and denoting a transitional state, whether it is a rite of passage during this life or to the next one.

Starting from van Gennep's anthropological study, Victor Turner develops the concept of liminality into a full-blown theory of culture, especially in his book From Ritual to Theater (1982). In the first and most important chapter of this book, ‘Liminal to liminoid in play, flow, and ritual’, Turner argues that liminality is a key notion in understanding the differences between small-scale human societies and large-scale, more complex ones. According to him, the second, transitional stage of van Gennep's rite of passage can be described as an ‘anti-structure’, because it temporarily reverses or suspends the normal social structure or order of the community. Citing Brian Sutton-Smith's paper on ‘Games of order and disorder’ (1972), Turner further argues that the liminal st...