Johan Huizinga, “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon”
“Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing” (46)
“human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play” (46)
“play is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex” (46)
“It is a significant function—that is to say, there is some sense to it” (46)
“In play there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action” (46)
Many false hypotheses “start from the assumption that play must serve something which is not play” (47)
“it is precisely this fun-element that characterizes the essence of play” (48)
“Here we have to do with an absolutely primary category of life” (48)
“We may well call play a ‘totality’ in the modern sense of the word” (48)
“play is a thing on its own” (48)
“Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions … but not play” (48)
“whatever else play is, it is not matter … it bursts the bounds of the physically existent” (48)
Commentator’s Note: Hold up Huizinga. Play is another mode in which the physically existent can be.
“From the point of view of a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces, play would be altogether superfluous” (48)
Commentator’s Note: This is Gadamer’s point, the structure of presentation. Play is superfluous, because it is the aesthetic function of the real, the operation of the real opening itself and adding to itself. But not Huizinga.
“Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos” (48)
“We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational” (48)
Commentator’s Note: Some classic anthropocentrism, locating the impetus in humanity, rather than interpreting humanity as a particular outworking of the impetus—presentation (Gadamer), individuation (Simondon), unilateral determination (Laruelle).
“we begin where biology and psychology leave off” (48)
Play is a “given magnitude existing before culture itself existed, accompanying it and pervading it from the earliest beginnings” (48)
“Play as a special form of activity, as a ‘significant form,’ as a social function—that is our subject” (48)
Commentator’s Note: Play as a signifying form. This is what Gadamer and others do well.
“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty” (49)
Commentator’s Note: Nope. This is not how language works. Very much rooted in a dualistic conception of the linguistic subject.
“play is the direct opposite of seriousness” (49)
But “as we proceed from ‘play is non-seriousness’ to ‘play is not serious,’ the contrast leaves us in the lurch—for some play can be very serious indeed” (49-50)
Play “is not foolish” (50)
“play, laughter, folly, wit, jest, joke, the comic, etc.—share the characteristic which we had to attribute to play, namely, that of resisting any attempt to reduce it to other terms. Their rationale and their mutual relationships must lie in a very deep layer of our mental being” (50)
“Play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity it has no moral function. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply here” (50)
“play is a function of the living, but is not susceptible of exact definition either logically, biologically, or aesthetically” (51)
Commentator’s Note: As Gadamer shows, play is not merely a function of the living, but the real.
The “social manifestations” of play are its “higher forms” (51)
“all play is a voluntary activity” (51)
“By this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of the natural process. It is something added thereto and spread out over it like a flowering, an ornament, a garment. Obviously, freedom must be understood here in the wider sense that leaves untouched the philosophical problem of determinism” (51)
Commentator’s Note: Huizinga brushes up against Gadamer, here. Play is “added,” it is an “ornament.” But then, Huizinga skirts the determinism question. But if we locate play in the real rather than in life, we come to understand that play is entirely caught up in the question of determinism—or rather, in an indeterminate metaphysics (Popper). I myself am not thoroughly settled on the matter, but would have to say, at the moment, that the unilateral determination of what is leads to an absolutely contingent, compromised, and open real. Whether or not we are, in fact, free, we must act as if we are, because the real will never tell us otherwise. We might say, the conditions of the reality set are indefinable by that set (Godel).
“Play is superfluous” (51)
Play “is free, is in fact freedom” (51)
Play “is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life” (51)
Commentator’s Note: Gadamer would counter that play is the very structure of the ordinary and the real.
“Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath” (52)
“play presents itself to us in the first instance: as an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives” (52)
Commentator’s Note: For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome is always intermezzo, the endlessly concatenating middle.
Play “adorns life, amplifies it” (52)
Commentator’s Note: Again, close to Gadamer here.
The “third main characteristic of play” is “its secludedness, its limitedness” (52)
“It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning” (53)
“While it is in progress all is movement, change, alternation, succession, association, separation,” but then, “Once played, it endures as a new-found creation of the mind” (53)
Commentator’s Note: This, Gadamer argues, is the real adding to itself, an increasement of being.
“All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally” (53)
“Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns” (53)
Play “creates order, is order” (53)
“It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects” (53)
Commentator’s Note: This definition falls due to its reliance on ‘aesthetic consciousness,’ the passive perceiver observing the painting, which Gadamer dismantles. Play is constructive, but this construction is not necessarily orderly, just as art need not be orderly, insofar as art is a product of presentation—art is that which is made to be presented.
“Play is ‘tense’” (53)
“Though play as such is outside the range of good and bad, the element of tension imparts to it a certain ethical value in so far as it means a testing of the player’s prowess” (54)
“The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheart; for the latter pretends to be playing the game … the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself” (54)
“A play-community generally tends to become permanent even after the game is over” (54)
Play “loves to surround itself with an air of secrecy” (55)
“Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means” (55)
“The function of play in the higher forms which concern us here can largely be derived from the two basic aspects under which we meet it: as a contest for something or a representation of something” (55)
“His [the child’s] representation is not so much a sham-reality as a realization in appearance: ‘imagination’ in the original sense of the word” (56)
Commentator’s Note: To fuse Sartre and Gadamer, appearance is reality and play is the appearing of the real.
“The sacred performance is more than an actualization in appearance only, a sham reality; it is also more than a symbolic actualization—it is a mystical one. In it, something invisible and inactual takes beautiful, actual, holy form” (56)
Commentator’s Note: This is the playful nature of the ceremony, a ritual that is intended for presentation.
“The rite is a dromenon, which means ‘something acted,’ an act, action. That which is enacted, or the stuff of the action, is a drama, which again means act, action represented on a stage” (56)
Commentator’s Note: So close to Gadamer here.
“The word ‘represents,’ however, does not cover the exact meaning of the act, at least not in its looser, modern connotations; for here ‘representation’ is really identification, the mystic repetition or re-preesntation of the event” (56)
Commentator’s Note: Gadamer reworks this structure of re-presentation in Truth and Method.
“The rite produces the effect which is then not so much shown figuratively as actually reproduced in the action” (57)
“The function of the rite, therefore, is far from being merely imitative; it causes the worshippers to participate in the sacred happening itself” (57)
Commentator’s Note: Gadamer reproduces this exact line of reasoning.
“As the Greeks would say, ‘it is methectic rather than mimetic.’ It is ‘a helping-out of the action’” (57)
“As Leo Frobenius puts it, archaic man plays the order of nature as imprinted on his consciousness” (57)
Commentator’s Note: We can reframe this as: humanity plays the order of nature as imprinted on its consciousness.
“he plays this great processional order of existence in a sacred play, in and through which he actualizes anew, or ‘recreates,’ the events represented” (57)
This is no “play instinct” (57)
“Ritual is seriousness at its highest and holiest. Can it nevertheless be play?” (59)
“Can we now extend the line to ritual and say that the priest performing the rites of sacrifice is only playing?” (59)
Commentator’s Note: Originary appearing, originary performing, originary playing. Appearance is the real.
“This identity of ritual and play was unreservedly recognized by Plato as a given fact” (59)
Play is “pointless but significant” (60)
“The turf, the tennis-court, the chess-board and pavement-hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle” (60)
If “we accept the essential and original identity of play and ritual we simply recognize the hallowed spot as a play-ground” (60-61)
“In the very nature of things the relationship between feast and play is very close. Both proclaim a standstill to ordinary life” (61)
“the unity and indivisibility of belief and unbelief, the indissoluble connection between sacred earnest and ‘make-belive’ or ‘fun,’ are best understood in the concept of play itself” (63)
“The most we can say of the function that is operative in the process of image-making or imagination is that it is a poetic function; and we define it best of all by calling it a function of play—the ludic function, in fact” (64)
“the apparently quite simple question of what play really is, leads us deep into the problem of the nature and origin of religious concepts” (64)
In ritual, there “is a mystic unity. The one has become the other. In his magic dance the savage is a kangaroo” (64)
“it remains an open question whether we do not come nearest to the mental attitude of the savage performing a ritual act, by adhering to this primary, universally understandable term ‘play’” (64)
Commentator’s Note: Sartre: being is appearing. Huizinga toys with this being (rational)/appearing (irrational) divide between “us” and “savages,” but a leftist/existentialist critique demonstrates how false this divide is.
Games
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