Notion Of Play Research Articles

Entitles: Booker T. Washington's Signs of Play

Entitles:Booker T. Washington's Signs of Play Susanna Ashton "The first thing that came in my way of book learning was the number 18," wrote Booker T. Washington in his memoir Up From Slavery. He goes on to explain that in the darkness of the salt furnaces where he and his stepfather worked, the boss would go around and mark each barrel with an identifying number. Washington's stepfather was always "18," and Washington recalls that "after a while I got to the point where I could make that figure, though I knew nothing about any other figures or letters" (18). While Washington spends much time extolling his own hard work in mastering book learning in his later years, the ambiguity of his initial phrasing is telling—that something "came in my way." The phrasing opens up the interpretative possibilities that this essay seeks to explore—by the way of what things did he encounter book learning? And, equally, how were those same things obstacles? A complex exchange of signification and power underlying the ambiguity of this phrase can be seen in Washington's memoir, especially in the scenes that illustrate the mastery of literacy. These scenes use troubled terms quite unlike the traditional equation of literacy and freedom common to antebellum slave narratives. Indeed, Washington's sense of "play" with the codes and sign systems used by white society seems barely congruent [End Page 1] with the portrait of the literal-minded and doggedly pragmatic leader he came to be known as in his adulthood.1 "Play" is significant here for a number of reasons, but one aspect involves Washington's composition of Up From Slavery itself. After reviewing the first few pages of what was to become Up From Slavery, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook magazine (which was planning to publish the series of recollections), asked Washington specifically if he could add anecdotes about his play as a child: "I, for example, would like very much to know more of your boyhood life in the slave days, if it were possible for you to give it. Did you have any sports, any education, any work to do before emancipation?" (Abbott 159) With a polite but crushing assessment of the profound disconnect between the genteel northern literary professional and a man born into enslavement and desperate poverty, Booker T. Washington responded in Up From Slavery with the following: I was asked not long ago to tell something about the sports and pastimes that I engaged in during my youth. Until that question was asked it had never occurred to me that there was no period of my life that was devoted to play. From the time that I can remember anything, almost every day of my life has been occupied in some kind of labour; though I think I would now be a more useful man if I had had time for sports. (9) Washington's sense of play was redefined in his own terms. As he went on to explain, instead of "play," his childhood was spent in terrified service, often delivering corn to a local mill, all the while fearing both the dark and lonely road and punishment for a late return.2 "Play" wasn't merely absent; it was replaced with labor and terror. Washington's notion of play was inflected by a sense that while meanings and words might be culturally translatable, they weren't necessarily fixed. In retrospect, Washington seems uncertain of how precisely such cultural translations ever came about. In this essay I consider Washington's often reluctant, but sometimes wry and knowing, dismantling of various meaning systems to demonstrate how he was simultaneously constructed and sited by language. Washington, with his famously stolid persona, nonetheless recognized the fragmented nature of the signifier. In his writings he continually reports or imagines disruptions of language as the defining moments of his life. Washington widens the activity of the signifier—not in a redemptively radical way concerned with redeeming or re-interpreting his political legacy. Rather, this analysis should demonstrate that his political actions and life activities were an outgrowth of a deep and canny skepticism he [End Page 2] had for language...

Stagnering en transformering: die rol van die nar in <i>Paljas</i>

Stagnation and transformation: The role of the clown in Paljas This article focuses on the central problem in the film Paljas, and the role of the clown in the process of transformation that is embedded in the story. The stagnation in interpersonal relationships and the accompanying problem of identity on a personal and social level constitute the problem underlying the narrative. The youngest child refuses to speak and dysfunctional family relationships and marital problems are evident. These problems can mainly be ascribed to the spatial isolation in which the characters find themselves. Attention is therefore paid to the way in which space functions in this film. The arrival of an absconded circus clown effects transformation and healing – especially by means of his picaresque performances and the notion of play. Subsequently this article concentrates on the characteristics of game/playing as a cultural activity and on its liberating value. The clown also has definite Biblical connotations as far as the aspects of betrayal and redemption are concerned. The process of transformation as depicted in this film is completed when the child starts speaking again, dysfunctional family relationships are restored and the family is reinstated in the community because of their restored social status.

Playing at work: Understanding the Future of Work Practices at the Institute for the Future

This paper analyses the latest management assumptions and theories of playing at work, by examining how management strategies, especially relating to new media, invoke elements of play to create distinct and competing genres of discourse. After a brief overview of the latest management crisis of innovation, we will provide a few definitions of play, followed by a short summary of where play and other competing dialogues converge and overlap at worksites historically. This context will then enable us to present an ethnographic account of play at work at a non-profit forecast research firm known as the Institute for the Future, a site where notions of play are linked to a number of business and cultural discourses about the future of new media and presented in full relief. What we find is that while elements of play exist, the discourses that arise from it do not necessarily belong in the realm of play at all. Instead, notions of play at work are tied to wider historical frameworks acknowledging earlier 1960s American counter-cultural appeals for new values in management and worker self-actualization, and linked to a process for transforming that renewed impulse into the service of a networked economy in the 1990s.

Game, Set, Stanza: Modern Sport in Russia and the Poetry of OsipMandel'shtam

A drawing entitled Sportsmen (Sportsmeny), depicting two young men with tennis racquets and a book, appeared in the May 1914 issue of Novyi satri,-kol along with the following text: Today at my sister's I saw a certain book: the works of Tennyson, the first tennis player exclaims. Brother, take a look at it, replies his partner. Perhaps there's something there on tennis! To which the first responds: Yes, I think it's a tennis manual.' This droll mix of poetry and sports struck a new note in Russia. Earlier issues of Novyi satirikon contained nothing of the sort, yet only a month after Sportsmeny, the same periodical printed Osip Mandel'shtam's poem Tennis. Then, two months later, Mandel'shtam published his poems Sport and Futbol (August 1914). A fourth Mandel'shtam poem on athletics, Futbol (often called Vtoroi futbol), appeared in the January 1914 issue of Zlatotsvet, another literary-humoristic magazine of the time. Mandel'shtam, however, included only Tennis in Kamen'. his first book of verse. Why this sudden interest in sports? And why celebrate these purely recreational activities through poetry? Did Mandel'shtam's work reflect a new trend in Russian society? Before any discussion of athletics in prerevolutionary Russia and before any analysis of Mandel'shtam's sports poems, our innate or, at the very least, traditional appreciation for requires some elucidation. Play constitutes an essential aspect of athletics, while games are entertaining action that is both pleasurable and enriching. Johan Huizinga elaborates upon three concepts underlying our notion of play: first, play is voluntary and thus inherently a free act; second, play is not ordinary life, but rather an activity that is satisfying in itself; and third, play maintains a quintessential detachment, for when the

Playing a Game of Worlds in Nabokov's Pale Fire

Playing a Game of Worlds in Nabokov's Pale Fire Martine Hennard (bio) I Forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpreting. —Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals To begin with a quote from "On the Genealogy of Morals" (III, 24) in a mock-imitation of Kinbote's presumptuous display of learning is a way of putting the argument of this piece into play, since Nabokov's rhetorical strategy inevitably condemns the reader to pale or paltry mimicry. Whatever ploys the commentator may deploy, the devices of her discourse are necessarily imitative, derivative, derisory: any posture becomes imposture (pseudo-scholarly, pseudoliterary, pseudo-apologetic). Leading the critic from the track of meaning to the turn of its tricks, the emblem (see Index) of Pale Fire may well turn out to be double-talk in a story of double-crossing. [End Page 299] This suspect supplement (impossible and necessary, yet always already inadequate according to the rules of the Nabokovian game) will suggest that Pale Fire problematizes the distinction between critical and creative writing. Since the question of interpretation posed by the novel is enmeshed in a radical rethinking of the notion of identity, I shall address the related issues of subjectivity, subjectmatter and subjection in and through writing by taking the figure of the exile as a metaphor for the subject in Pale Fire.1 As my (ab)use of a specific theoretical lexicon shows, my account of the emergence of the critic as creator draws on Derrida's notions of play and différance, while my discussion of Kinbote's articulation and dissemination of identity in the writing process will be loosely based on Kristeva's semiotic treatment of the self. Derrida and Kristeva share with Nabokov an interest in the creative and disruptive potential of displacement which enables them to articulate a critique of traditional modes of thinking from a borderline position.2Pale Fire refracts related concerns in the fictional mode by shattering oppositions such as self versus other, reason versus madness, reality versus imagination, creative versus critical writing. The novel can also be viewed as addressing a problem of periodization and categorization: located on the frontier "in-between" the modernist and postmodernist movements, Pale Fire questions the literary historian's drive to distinguish them as separate modes of writing. In its superposition of a poem in heroic couplets and a mock-heroic fantasy masquerading as commentary, it may however suggest that postmodernism differs from modernism by inscribing the postal supplement which reveals (and revels in the recognition) that meaning never arrives except as a distorted, misread message. Traveling through these reflections, the exile will be my joker, appearing at various textual levels and replayed in each section of running notes under a different (dis)guise. As Kinbote would have it, to indulge in "an execrable pun" (176), "exile becomes a bad habit" (229). Pale Fire brilliantly dramatizes the Derridean "infinite drift of meaning" whereby a text, once cut off from its originating source and circumstances, becomes prey to a paranoid scholar and his far-fetched (as far as Zembla) interpretation. As a consequence, the interaction between Shade's poem and Kinbote's commentary can be viewed (that is, interpreted in its turn) as an allegory of reading: no longer authorized, meaning ceases to be original, definite and definitive, and starts "wandering." In other words, language is shown to exceed an intended meaning irretrievably lost as soon as materialized in discourse—a tenet crucial to much post-structuralist [End Page 300] theory. To translate this idea into current academic code words (see note to I. 469), Pale Fire forecloses the possibility of a transcendental signified (be it validated by the author or inherent to language) and its differential freeplay of meaning questions metaphysical categories such us presence, essence and truth. Kinbote's reading thus exemplifies in a parodic form the elusive nature and ambivalent status of any creative or interpretive activity, which of course constitute writing's very conditions of possibility. The signification of Nabokov's allegory remains fundamentally ambiguous, however, insofar as Kinbote's presence turns out to be fatal to the poet, while his critical liberty reduces Shade...

Sartre's Ethics of Ambiguity (review)

Reviews441 influential Liber Regularum of Tyconius. On the odier hand, chapter 1, which insists diat die prayerful and often rambling voice of Augustine the speaker in the Confessions must be distinguished from the intention of Augustine the audior of the Confessions, is die most convincing. McMahon, who eschews lengdiy discussion ofprevious scholarship, concludes his volume with a brief bibliography and an even briefer general index. The index of passages from the Confessions is quite helpful and wül make Augustine's PrayerfulAscent a handy companion for what it should inspire: a fresh rereading of Augustine's immensely influential book. Western Washington UniversityRichard K. Emmerson Sartre's Ethics of Ambiguity, by Linda A. Bell; 223 pp. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989, $25.95. The conventional wisdom about Sartre's ethics is that his system is flawed by certain significantly unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable, conflicts. In Being and Nothingness Sartre defended at length a number of notorious theses: the impossibUity of achieving mutual recognition of each others' freedoms, the unattainability of the Kantian ideal oftreating persons as ends and not means, and die presence of conflict rather than community as the essence of interpersonal relations. These views apparently clash with Sartre's well-known political advocacy; also with other of his writings, especially the popular Existentialism Is a Humanism, which argues that we are morally obliged to respect die freedom of odiers and endorses a kind of categorical imperative based on a sense ofmoral community. At the end oíBeing and Nothingness Sartre promised a future work on the ediical consequences of his phUosophy of freedom and consciousness. That work never eventuated and many have seen his subsequent commitment to Marxism as an implicit recognition ofthe incompatibUity of his earlier phUosophy with his public stance as a political activist. Linda Bell's book chaUenges this commonly accepted view of Sartre's ethics. She argues for the possibUity of a coherent, viable Sartrean ethics, drawing on die whole range of Sartre's writings. Her argument proceeds by focusing on five sets of questions about Sartre's ethics of deliverance and salvation. First, Sartre's condemnation of bad faith is defended against the famUiar charge of inconsistency. On BeU's interpretation, what is involved in Sartre's moraljudgement is purely analytic, given the nature of moral choice and die moral point ofview. Second, inferences from die inevitabüity of individual alienation to the 442Philosophy and Literature inevitabUity of bad faidi are rejected by distinguishing two kinds of alienation, onlyone ofwhich is unavoidable. Third, questions concerningSartre's relativism and die ultimate futility ofactions are answered by appeal to die notion ofplay, the adoption of a nonserious, nonpossessive attitude. Fourth, Sartre's revolutionary condemnation of certain social structures is squared widi his daims about die inevitabUity of social alienation by a recognition that some sorts of avoidable alienation may be overcome by revolution. Finally, the possibUity of authentic relationships widi odiers is affirmed and instances of a serious alternative to sequestration and individualism are located in Sartre's work and in his life. BeU's attempt to present an adequate Sartrean ethics of autiienticity makes Uluminating use of the entire corpus of Sartre's writings, induding his literary works as well as his more conventionally phUosophical texts, and she is particularly good at resolving interpretive difficulties by juxtaposing writings not usuaUy connected togedier. She exhibits an impressive famUiarity with the bulky Sartrean canon, as well as with the large secondary literature on Sartre. AU this, together with the carefully focused scope of her project, makes die book a very useful contribution to the exegetical literature on Sartre. It is, however, very much a work in the commentarial genre, notwithstanding some welcome attempts to connect various of the issues treated with themes of other writers (including Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Hare). There is no real attempt to take the argument beyond what Sartre might have said and the exegesis, though lucid and thorough, is not philosophically suggestive in the way that, say, Danto's litde book on Sartre is. But within its self-imposed limits this is a meticulous and creditable piece of philosophical scholarship. Massey University, New ZealandRoy W. Perrett StructuralismandtL·LogicofDissent, by EveTavorBannet...

Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent (review)

442Philosophy and Literature inevitabUity of bad faith are rejected by distinguishing two kinds of alienation, onlyone ofwhich is unavoidable. Third, questions concerningSartre's relativism and the ultimate futility ofactions are answered by appeal to die notion ofplay, the adoption of a nonserious, nonpossessive attitude. Fourth, Sartre's revolutionary condemnation of certain social structures is squared widi his daims about die inevitabUity of social alienation by a recognition that some sorts of avoidable alienation may be overcome by revolution. Finally, the possibUity of authentic relationships widi odiers is affirmed and instances of a serious alternative to sequestration and individualism are located in Sartre's work and in his life. BeU's attempt to present an adequate Sartrean ethics of autiienticity makes Uluminating use of the entire corpus of Sartre's writings, induding his literary works as well as his more conventionally phUosophical texts, and she is particularly good at resolving interpretive difficulties by juxtaposing writings not usuaUy connected togedier. She exhibits an impressive famUiarity with the bulky Sartrean canon, as well as with the large secondary literature on Sartre. AU this, together with the carefully focused scope of her project, makes the book a very useful contribution to the exegetical literature on Sartre. It is, however, very much a work in the commentarial genre, notwithstanding some welcome attempts to connect various of the issues treated with themes of other writers (including Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Hare). There is no real attempt to take the argument beyond what Sartre might have said and the exegesis, though lucid and thorough, is not philosophically suggestive in the way that, say, Danto's litde book on Sartre is. But within its self-imposed limits this is a meticulous and creditable piece of philosophical scholarship. Massey University, New ZealandRoy W. Perrett StructuralismandtL·LogicofDissent, by EveTavorBannet; 229 pp. Champaign: University of IUinois Press, 1989, $14.95. Eve Tavor Bannet's Structuralism and tL· Logic of Dissent focuses on four influential French thinkers,Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Her thesis is that all ofthese figures chiefly address the question of alienation. "If the blanket term, alienation, has come to seem rather oldfashioned to us today, it is in no smaU measure due to the efforts made by Lacan, Bardies, Foucault, and Derrida to redefine it and to deal widi it in smaller and more manageable sections." Moreover, Bannet thinks that such figures "have sought beyond the automatism of culture and the darkness of negation to find the thin small-wedge from which itis stiU honestand honourable Reviews443 to speak" (pp. 2, 3). Hence Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are brought back within the fold ofliberal humanism. In flagrant disregard of the positions staked out by Lacan et al., Bannet states, "It would be impossible to write this or any other book if God and the self were really dead; if the audior were really absent from his work; iflanguage were nothing but an aUen circuit which each of us is condemned to repeat . . ." (p. 1). Evidently, Bannet's readings are conditioned by a phUosophical outlook running counter to the audiors she reads. She cannot take seriously that French intellectuals actually mean what diey write. Rather, she believes they are only talking about the death of God and the author in order to get our goat. She is very much under the impression diat their writings are a type of negative theology intended to alert us to "affirmations of [the] desire for being, individuality, and truth" (p. 1). The individual chapters on Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida consist of dearly written basic summaries. But they do not make original contributions to the elucidation of these figures. Much of her summarizing is compUed from other people's commentaries. For example, the footnote apparatus shows that when Bannet discusses Lacan in relation to May 1968 she recycles but does not add anything to summaries made by commentators like Sherry Turkic Troublesome to me is her summary of Lacan's Poe seminar which has benefited, directly or indirectly, from the analyses ofJeffrey Mehlman, Shoshana Felman, and perhaps others. Yet, these analyses are not acknowledged or, what is more important to me, developed or challenged. This practice results...

McLuhan’s Use of the Notion of Play in His Approach to Ultimate Reality and Meaning

McLuhan’s Use of the Notion of Play in His Approach to Ultimate Reality and Meaning