Stupidity of Competitiveness (Peter Gray)

Collin Turnbull, who studied the Mbuti of central Africa, described ceremonial tug-of-war games played by the entire band each year. Men and boys take one side of the vine rope, women and girls take the other, and they sing in antiphony as they pull. When the men and boys start to win, “one of them will abandon his side and join the women, shouting encouragement to them in a falsetto, ridiculing womanhood by the very exaggeration of his mime.” Then, when the women and girls start to win, “one of them strides over to the men’s side and joins their shouting in a deep bass voice, similarly gently mocking manhood.” “Each person crossing over tries to outdo the ridicule of the last, causing more and more laughter, until when the contestants are laughing so hard they cannot sing or pull any more, they let go of the vine rope and fall to the ground in near hysteria. The ridicule is performed without hostility, rather with a sense of empathy. It is in this way that the violence and aggressivity of either sex ‘winning’ is avoided, and the stupidity of competitiveness is demonstrated.”

Free to Learn, Peter Gray, 2013

Making Do (Italo Calvino)

There was a town where everything was forbidden.

Now, since the only thing that wasn’t forbidden was the game tip-cat, the town’s subjects used to assemble on meadows behind the town and spend the day there playing tip-cat.

And as the laws forbidding things had been introduced one at a time and always with good reason, no one found any cause for complaint or had any trouble getting used to them.

Years passed. One day the constables saw that there was no longer any reason why everything should be forbidden and they sent messengers to inform their subjects that they could do whatever they wanted.

The messengers went to those places where the subjects were wont to assemble. 

‘Hear ye, hear ye,’ the messengers announced. 'You are free to do what you want.’

The people went on playing tip-cat.

'Understand?' the messengers insisted. 'You are free to do what you want.’

'Good,’ replied the subjects. 'We’re playing tip-cat.’

The messengers busily reminded them on the many wonderful and useful occupations they had once engaged in and could now engage in once again. But the subjects wouldn’t listen and just went on playing, stroke after stroke, without even stopping for a breather. 

Seeing that their efforts were in vain, the messengers went to tell the constables. 

'Easy,’ the constables said. 'Let’s forbid the game of tip-cat.’

That was when the people rebelled and killed the lots of them.

Then without wasting time, they got back to playing tip-cat.

from Numbers in the Dark, (translated by Tim Parks)

Secrets of the Game (Georgi Gospodinov)

Fathers are interested in little things, like when did we first walk. No one asks, for example, when was the first thought. The first thoughts, step by step, I would like to give them visibility. The seven waking years of childhood. Now we are in the cherry tree, my brother and me. We pull out cherries, accumulate pits in our mouths and, like cherry cannons, we try to spit them further and further away. Under the cherry tree, on a crudely assembled table covered with newspapers, the four eternal old men of the neighborhood are playing cards. My brother and I are studying the game from above. Actually, we are the ones most involved because we see the cards of all four of them. Then, when the old men leave, we come down from the cherry tree, take their place and try to repeat their gestures and lines, for which Mom would threaten to cut out our tongues. The hardest part was learning to bang the table really hard. That's the trick to overtrumping. You bend the fingers of the hand holding the card so that you almost close your fist and bang on the table. No matter how much the bones in our hands turned blue, we couldn't get the effect we wanted. If we could find the move, we thought, then the game would have no more secrets for us.

From Natural Novel (1999)*

* To our surprise, this very excerpt of the novel seems missing in the English version. The text above is a revised machine translation from the French edition, compared to the Turkish edition. Not very natural, is it :)

Play and Philosophy (Eugen Fink)

Play is obviously the most extreme counterpart to everything “serious,” and withdraws from the strict conceptual sobriety of philosophy.

This is the usual way of portraying the antipodean relationship between “play” and “philosophy,” assessing it as an opposed relationship between “immediacy” and “reflective mediation.” However, it should perplex us that supposedly simple and immediate play goes around confidently with a broken, fragmented “understanding of Being”—and that, on the other hand, philosophy that problematizes strives for distinct clarity in the knowledge of beings. The player’s existentiell immediacy moves pleasurably in the labyrinth of Being and appearance—the thinker’s existentiell fragmentation attempts to force its way through everything apparent to the true essence.

Play and philosophy have more in common with each other than the usual demarcations suppose; they refer in their immanent understanding of Being to the same appearing and manifesting of beings in the world...

Selected parts from Play and Philosophy (1966),

in Play as Symbol of the World , Eugen Fink (Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner) 

Read full text of the article

Play as the System of Systems (Kostas Axelos)

What is our role as readers and parties to play, as parties to diverse forms of play? Our task consists in knowing how to read in a given instance of world’s play every other type of play, and principally, the play of the world. But we must not only read, we must play, turning the rules upside down when necessary, experimenting beyond the subject-object dichotomy with a plurality of perspectives on each problem. It is a question of matching, with serenity and sadness, to world’s play the unspeakable, the unnameable, the unplayable without hurriedly forcing it into little systems which would exhaust it with their reductionist, unilateral, imperialistic methods. We must hold ourselves ready for play which summons as, play of language, thought, work, struggle, love, and death. (One cannot say that life is worth or not worth living since it is not a question of lving it – with or without reason for living – but of playing it...)

Play as the System of Systems, Kostas Axelos, 1970

Playing and Reality (D.W. Winnicott)

Play is immensely exciting. It is exciting not primarily because the instincts are involved, be it understood! The thing about playing is always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects. This is the precariousness of magic itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a relationship that is being found to be reliable.

It is not inside by any use of the word. Nor is it outside, that is to say, it is not a part of the repudiated world, the not-me, that which the individual has decided to recognize as truly external, which is outside magical control. To control what is outside one has to do things, not simply to think or to wish, and doing things takes time. Playing is doing.

Playing and Reality, D.W. Winnicott, 1971

Play and History (Giorgio Agamben)

But the world of play is connected to time in an even more specific sense. Everything which is old, independent of its sacred origins, is liable to become a toy. But what, then, is the essence of the toy? The toy is what belonged –once, no longer– to the realm of the sacred or of the practical-economic. (...) an eminently historical thing (...) What the toy preserves of its sacred or economic model, what survives of this after its dismemberment or miniaturization, is nothing other than the human temporality that was contained therein: its pure historical essence.

If what children play with is history, and if play is a relationship with objects and human behavious that draws from them a pure historical-temporal aspect, it does not then seem irrelevant that in a fragment of Heraclitus – that is to say, at the origins of the European thought – aion, time in its original sense, should figure as a ‘child playing with dice’, and that ‘domain of the baby’ should define the scope of this play. When Heraclitus tells us that aion is a child playing, he thereby depicts as play the temporalizing essence of the living being.

In Playland, in Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben, 1993 (trans. Liz Heron)

Play and the Urban Realm (Quentin Stevens)

The concept of play embraces a variety of ways in which people test and transgress the limits of their social existence. In terms of play within the urban public realm, Lefebvre’s (1991b) critique of modern city planning suggests that play means encounters with difference, encounters which contest the fragmentation and alienation of contemporary social experience.

Play provides opportunities for critiquing, transforming and expanding social practice because of its diversity and creativity, its testing of limits, the absence of instrumental gain and its separation from the roles, rules and expectations of everyday life.

The social experiences framed by urban space can reveal, and indeed stimulate, new needs and new possibilities; they create, reawaken and resituate meanings. Lefebvre’s (1996) formulation of the dialecticity of everyday life is captured in his conception of ‘moments’. Moments are temporally limited social experiences, characterized by conditions under which the oppositions and contradictions of social life are intensified, thereby raised to consciousness, and engaged. Lefebvre’s idea of play as a moment is thus far more dialectical and creative than Huizinga’s formulation of play as occurring separated from the everyday.

Play and the Urban Realm, in The Ludic City, Quentin Stevens, 2007

The Abolition of Work (Bob Black)

Les frères, rue du Docteur Lecène, Paris - Robert Doisneau (1934)

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance.

The Abolition of Work, Bob Black, 1985

Dream for Real (Eugen Fink)

Playing is a kind of waking dream, distinct from the ordinary dream in sleep by its being carried out collectively. When we dream in sleep, we can, to be sure, very well stand in diverse communal relations in the dream-world; the dream-world-I is together with other dream-world-fellows. But the dreaming-I is alone. In contrast, in play we have not merely a community of persons according to the playworldly roles, but always also an actually existent community of real players, who are open to one another in the communal activity of playing. [...] Just as the one who is awake judges in the clear sobriety of the morning the wild, colorful dream of the night, so too has metaphysical philosophy all the way back to its beginning judged play— and it has passed judgment on it as a “mere reproduction.”

[...]

When philosophical confrontation with the Dionysian violent play [Spielgewalt] of human life and the world was led into a primal animosity and extreme fervor—in Plato’s battle with the poets, with Homer and the tragic Muse—critical thinking began with the mirror-character of play and thereby already reached the verdict that all poetry is only imitation. The interpretation of poetic art as mimēsis governs the metaphysical interpretation of art for a long time hence. The poet, says Plato, resembles the painter, and the painter resembles a mirror. So long as we suppose play to be derivative appearance, to be mirroring, and suppose mirroring to be a reproduction of archetypical things in residual silhouettes, we are all held under the spell of the Platonic interpretation. We must free ourselves from this spell.

Play as Symbol of the World (1960), Eugen Fink (Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner) 

Illustration: Plato, by Summerise Xia

Fairground on Earth (Şule Gürbüz)

I keep giving money and my valuable things for lingering at this fairground on earth, doing nothing, spectating you. Beyond the fairground is full of abysses – I have been to its edge a few times, but apparently that is also part of the entertainment. Another reason for my indifference is that, in life, I feel as though watching myself on a screen. I cannot intervene in anything – merely looking. The film has no intermissions; I am thirsty and weary though. But once you leave you cannot come back, and the seats around me are full of dead; I cannot bear it. I like my play; but this game is definetely not my cup of tea.

Kambur, Şule Gürbüz, 1992

Ruins of Play (Eugen Fink)

What was once an invocation of the gods becomes a song in a children’s game [Spielsang eines Kinderspiels]; an activity originally intended for ritual becomes the mere convention of playful conduct in a game of entertainment [Unterhaltungsspiel]. Much of what in everyday life is only a curious product of play [Spielwerk], an ancient tradition of play [Spielsitte], is a relic of archaic practices. The ruins of play, too, and not only that of cities and empires, litter the battlefield of history.

Play as Symbol of the World, Eugen Fink, 1960

(Translated by  Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner) 

Playing not to Beat (Claude Lévi-Strauss)

The noncompetitive character of some of these societies has often been invoked to explain their resistance to development and industrialization. Let us not forget, however, that the passivity and indifference for which they are criticized may be a consequence of the trauma resulting from contact with industrial civilization, not a condition present from the start. In addition, what appears to us to be a flaw and a lack may correspond to an original way of conceiving the relations of human beings with one another and with the world. Let me clarify with an example. When peoples from the interior of New Guinea learned from the missionaries how to play soccer, they enthusiastically adopted that game. But instead of pursuing the victory of one of the two teams, they increased the number of matches until the victories and defeats on each side balanced out. The game ended not, as for us, when there was a winner, but rather when everyone was assured there would be no loser.

Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World (p.67), Claude Lévi-Strauss

Spaces and Kings (Georges Perec)

You have fallen headlong into the spellbinding pleasures of patience. You deal out four columns of thirteen cards on the bed, you remove the four aces. The game consists in arranging the forty-eight remaining cards by using the four spaces left by the removel of the aces; if one of the spaces happens to be the first in a column, you are allowed to put a two there; if it follows, say, a six, you can insert the seven of the same suit, a seven can be followed by an eight, an eight by a nine, a jack by the queen; if the space follows a king, you may not lay anything and the space is dead.

Chance has virtually no role to play in this patience. You can foresee a long time in advance the moment when the four cleared spaces would bring you up against kings, and therefore failure, if you were to play them in order; but, precisely, you do not have to: you are allowed to use one space, then a different one, come back to the first, jump to the third, the fourth, back to the second again. Nevertheless, you rarely succeed; there always comes a point when the game is blocked, when, with half or a third of the cards already in order, you can no longer fill a space without turning up a king every time. In theory, you have the right to two more attempts: you just have to leave the ordered cards where they are and deal out again the other cards into four new columns, after having shuffled them. But you rarely avail yourself of these two supplementary chances; no sooner does the game appears lost than you scoop up all the cards, shuffle them once or twice, and deal them out again for another attempt.

You shuffle the cards, deal them out, remove the aces, and take stock of the situation. You begin more or less at random, taking care only to avoid laying bare a king too soon. Gradually, the game starts to take shape, constraints appear, possibilities come to light: there is one card already in its proper place, over here a single move will allow you to arrange five or six in one go, over there a king that is in your way cannot be moved.

You hardly ever get the patience out. You cheat sometimes, a little, rarely, increasingly rarely. Winning doesn’t matter to you, for what would winning mean to you anyway, and if it’s just a question of having the gods on your side, there are easier ways of inducing them to look kindly on you. But you play more and more often, for longer and longer, sometimes all afternoon, or as soon as you get up, or right thorugh the night, and not even, not even any longer, just to kill time.

There is something about this game that fascinates you, perhaps even more than the game with the water under the bridges, or the labyrinths in the ceilings, or the imperfectly opaque twigs which drift slowly across the surface of your cornea. Depending on where it is, or when it crops up, each card acquires an almost poignant density. You protect, you destroy, you construct, you plot, you concoct one plan after another: a futile exercise, a danger that entails no risk of punishment, a derisory restoration of order: forty-eight cards keep you chained to your room and you feel almost happy when a ten happens to fall into place or when a king is unable to thwart you, and you feel almost unhappy when all your patient calculations lead to the same impossible outcome. It is as if this solitary silent strategy were your only way forward, as if it had become your reason for being.

A Man Asleep , Georges Perec, 1967

(trans. Andrew Leak)

Profane Vocation of Play (Giorgio Agamben)

Oasis of Happiness (Eugen Fink)

Play is not happiness, not the fulfillment of the universal intention; yet by interrupting this intention, it temporarily liberates one from this directedness and precisely thereby presents, in a spatially delimited way, happiness, an “oasis of happiness.” Play fulfills, even if in its own delimited way, the universal intention of serious life; it does not stand opposed to the latter but first becomes understandable through the universal tendency of care belonging to human existence itself: “Only a being determined essentially by ‘care’ also has the possibility of ‘carelessness.’”

That, therefore, play stands precisely in a particular relation to the tendency of care belonging to life, indeed in such a way that, in it, the goal-directedness of caring life is suspended in a determinate way, grounds its “carelessness.” Even play sets goals, which are goals in its playworld; yet these goals that are immanent to play are not “projected out toward the highest ultimate purpose.” These immanent goals of play can, however, be related to the highest goal of life, insofar as these immanent goals, which are not at all immediately subordinate to the highest goal of life itself, make the latter first of all visible. Fink expresses this as follows: Insofar as play “appears to escape [entziehen] the standard flow of life, it relates [bezieht] to it in a manner that is particularly imbued with sense, namely, in the mode of portrayal [Darstellung].”

Play as Symbol of the World (1960), Eugen Fink (Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner) 

Illustration: Andrew Henry's Meadow, by Doris Burn 

Proletariat of the Soul, Play! (Oğuz Atay)

The greatest fallacy of the proletariat of reason and soul is to serve the bourgeoisie of reason and soul with the hope of attaining the blessings of the latter and in doing so, due to inevitable laws of abuse, being dispossessed, piece-by-piece, of their vulnerable reason and soul.

For this very reason, I say let’s not let them into our games! Or let’s disgrace them because we are crushed in real life! Let’s humiliate them! The proletariat of the soul! Violate the real if it comes to it! Never believe the lie that truth is to be spoken even in a game. I warn you! Truth is not on your side! Do not be played upon! You play up on them. Do not challenge them in the field of reason they rule on. So what if you play home for once? Never trust if they say there is but one field. Do not listen to those who dare you with the risk of losing your mind. We have nothing to lose. It is now time to see where our own power lies.

Dangerous Games, Oğuz Atay, 1973

Edge of the Possible (Eugen Fink)

The path of life, so to speak, is determined by an uncanny, accompanying contraction of our possibilities. Every activity that we earnestly carry out makes us more determinate and at the same time less possible. We continually determine ourselves, do irrevocable things. The more we attain to determinate actuality in the self-actualization accomplished through our deeds, the slighter do our possibilities become. [...]Play does not exhaust itself in a slavish reproduction; it also brings forth entirely new motifs, gets new possibilities to flare up, possibilities with which we are not acquainted in the space in which we otherwise carry out our lives. As a variation play is creative—but its productive power can only unfold in the useless realm of the “non- actual.”

Play as Symbol of the World (1960), Eugen Fink (Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner) 

Image: Man with Cuboid (1958), M.C. Escher

An Activity Producing Itself (Eugen Fink)

Playing is not an activity of fabrication, which would come to an end in a result detachable from the process of fabrication. We do not play after we have fabricated the game or the playworld, but rather we play only so long as we produce the playworld. The production of play does not come down to a result. Or in other words and formulated in a sharper antithesis: playing exists as the producing of playworldly appearance. The production of play primarily concerns human beings themselves, is a relation of enactment to a continually cultivated non-actual sphere of human roles...

There is no work in which playing crystallizes and comes to an end. Its process is itself its work, it happens spontaneously and ceases, it is an activity that happens for its own sake (...) In playing, the time in the future that remains outstanding is submerged as a motive force of acting. The futural whip drops away that otherwise goads us, hounds us, drives us, uses up the moment as a means. An existence pacified in itself in its carrying out of activity pervades the player and bestows a pure, felicitous present.

Play as Symbol of the World (1960), Eugen Fink

(Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner) 

Time to Play (Arthur C. Clarke)

Would the current technology allow us to build a future where we can play and enjoy “the freedom of children”? It depends, of course, what we are aiming and how we move towards the future we long for.

In an interview in 1970, science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke touches upon the question. This is what he had to say on the topic, more than fifty years ago!

CLARKE: ... We're in an early stage in the evolution of intelligence but a late stage in the evolution of life. Real intelligence won't be living.

GENE: I understand your meaning of that idea as a beneficial thing in which man is rendered obsolete as a specialist, obsolete as all the things he's been up to now (...) but, on the other hand, man is then totally free to live comprehensively, nonspecialized, like the freedom of children.

CLARKE: That's how I ended one of my essays on the subject. I said "Now it's time to play." The goal of the future is total unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.

Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood, 1970 

Image credit: Donato Giancola (Donato Arts)

Against the Daemons (Eugen Fink)

[T]he conspicuous thing in archaic existence is indeed precisely the belief in daemons, the paralyzing horror in the face of uncanny, spectral beings, the panic- stricken anxiety before numinous powers. No warrior’s bravery helps against this primal anxiety, no diligence and exertion at work helps. Precisely the two serious activities in which the human otherwise asserts himself, belligerent struggle and the toil of work, remain inconsequential here. One cannot battle with daemons and one cannot break their resistance by working. But the activity that one for the most part regards as the least serious and that one commonly believes to have no power, namely, play, becomes the sole possibility for the human being to counteract the magic power of the daemons or to turn their malevolence around. The mask of the player itself becomes a magical force. What that means philosophically is a most difficult problem.

Play as Symbol of the World (1960), Eugen Fink

(Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner) 

What is to be Done? (Jean-Luc Nancy)

This evokes some answers; which are still to be played out though.

"What is to be done, at present? The question is on everybody’s lips and, in a certain way, it is the question people always have lying in wait for any passing philosopher. Not: What is to be thought? But indeed: What is to be done? The question is on everybody’s lips (including the philosopher’s), but withheld, barely uttered, for we do not know if we still have the right, or whether we have the means, to raise it. (...) Perhaps though, we know one thing at least: ‘What is to be done?’ means for us: how to make a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor still entirely to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).

This would mean that the question places us simultaneously before a doubly imperative response. It is necessary to measure up to what nothing in the world can measure, no established law, no inevitable process, no prediction, no calculable horizon—absolute justice, limitless quality, perfect dignity—and it is necessary to invent and create the world itself, immediately, here and now, at every moment, without reference to yesterday and tomorrow. Which is the same as saying that it is necessary at one and the same time to affirm and denounce the world as it is—not to weigh out as best one can equal amounts of submission and revolt, and always end up halfway between reform and accommodation, but to make the world into the place, never still, always perpetually reopened, of its own contradiction, which is what it prevents us from ever knowing in advance what is to be done, but it imposes on us the task of never making anything that is not a world." 

Conversations with Brecht (Walter Benjamin)

July 12, 1934. Yesterday, after a game of chess, Brecht said: 'If Korsch comes we shall have to work out a new game with him. A game in which the positions do not always remain the same; where the function of the pieces changes if they have stood for a while on the same square: then they become either more effective or weaker. Like this, the game does not develop; it stays the same too long.'

On Situationist Games (Guy Debord)