play and desire

Dear Zsa Zsa,

It was Jürgen ("Mad Dog") Habermas' 90th birthday last week. This morning I read a news item about Festen for him. The story noted his insistence on an abstract, idealist position on the requirements of reason and justice. Against his critics who denounce his position as based on a counterfactual hypothesis, Habermas has always basically asserted that the point is to understand how far our real conditions of existence fail to be rational or just. The article affirmed my admiration for Habermas.

That affirmation shot directly to my desires in general (admiration being a kind of desire, after all). It is a curious emotion I am feeling: that my desires, whatever they are, are good. Well, in any case, in as much as they are desires, they're just fine. They don't hurt anybody, as desires.

Play and desire are complexly intertwined. [Insert psychoanalytic account here.]

I introduced you to my readers, Zsa Zsa, as my anonymized and shifting audience, and announced that my audience is usually someone I write to to flirt with. Just writing that it was Habermas' birthday, dropping in my joke nickname for him, and reporting that feeling affirmed for admiring him led me to feel affirmed in my desires generally, and then connecting desire to my continuing topic of play -- that's all flirtation.

None of that is to say that there's anything intellectually disingenuous about what I have written. In fact, this was the course my thoughts took this morning.

Let's accept that play has a libidinal element, and that when I play I often show off, and that when I show off it's often to flirt. What follows? Dissatisfyingly, the answer is that what follows is what follows.

Reason and justice are the big flirts in Habermas' thought. That is how Habermas incites desire, for me. That would likely seem perverse to many people, but I like it that way.

play, a first approximation: creative activity, breaking toys, giggling, and joy

Dear Zsa Zsa,

I want to play.

Play has some extremely different and heavy connotations in different lexicons. I'm not sure how many of those I'm excluding, but I do know I have a general meaning in mind that has something like a core to it.

Let me contrast play to creative activity as a first approximation. Play is not primarily directed toward producing something, even its own effects. It is for its own sake. Creative activity, as I'm using the concept here, produces something and is directed toward that production. Here's one place where the boundary becomes blurry, and where I get into trouble. What I do for play can become a creative activity. The effect of play can turn into an object for appropriation and production -- in a word, work. This happens gradually.

In fact, my so-called career as a so-called philosophy instructor is due to play becoming creative activity becoming work. I count my entry into this biz as the afternoon I spent quite innocently getting TREMENDOUSLY PISSED OFF AT IMMANUEL KANT, and developing a set of questions about the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that took three class sessions for the professor to address (thanks, Dr. Pressler). That was when, for lack of a better expression, I started taking this play seriously.

I have a tendency to that, it seems. Playing the guitar became something I took very seriously for a while, and I started teaching myself finger-picking and practicing until my hands were exhausted. Somewhere along the way, I fixated on the notion that I would play gigs, in front of other human beings. I was always thinking of playing as practicing for these future gigs. It became a chore. I didn't get very far before Ménière's Disease stopped me, and that might be lucky for me in a way, because, in the moments that I can play, I am no longer able to sustain the same degree of self-criticism. I know it's not feasible for me ever to play any gig. I'm fortunate when I get to play at all.

In short, a major problem I have is turning play into work. Some of my models of play require virtuoso skill, which you can only acquire with a ton of practice - i.e., work. (Practice is more or less breaking down playthings into pieces and then rebuilding them, over and over again. I am Hegelian to my bones.^*)

I know, for instance, that I play with words as much as I do because I already have a lot of skill developed, through endless iterations. This is my secret as an academic writer, too. While many of my friends and colleagues complain about the pain and suffering of writing, I never do. Whenever it doesn't feel like fun, I don't bother. I write a lot, I take very little of it very seriously, and even when I present it as a "product" of my "work," I (try to) suppress a giggle.

A major effect of play would seem to be joy. The giggles I suppress when I bring something I've written into a class are not because I'm so impressed with my own jokes (although they are brilliant), but because writing it was so damn much fun that I want to laugh out loud. I want to infect everyone with that enjoyment.

I know that part of what I'm doing is showing off while I play. Showing off might be ego-gratification on some level, and to that extent enter into a psycho-economy of symbolic exchange. Like the child at play, I often write things as though to shout "Look at me!" But notice the ambiguity of this shout: it is about "me," but is also a call to join in, if only as an observer. (Perhaps the adult called by the child counts as a kind of incomplete or incapable child, and the child notices that the adult's play is so attenuated they can only participate by observing.) Whether or not my writing floats your boat, you might still be able to appreciate that it floats mine. 

When I write in that free, joyful, giggle-inducing way, I am a Thelonious Monk song, and nothing can harm me, not even failure, because play is fail-safe. It can be started and stopped. It can be given life or death. But as long as it is, it can't fail to be play.

--




* G.W.F. Hegel wrote in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences that the most intelligent thing a child can do with their toys is to break them. I have always thought that was not only one of his keenest insights, and funniest lines, but also one of the best expressions of the heart of Hegel's philosophy. I'd love some day to write a commentary on Hegel and call it something like Broken Toys

resurrecting the blog to bare my soul to the world, again (and to Zsa Zsa)

I have let this blog thing languish. It hasn't been the right medium for me to do what I needed to do.

Everything I write that is in any way shared with others, I write to a specific audience, often of one, with whom I am generally, to some degree, flirting. So, to carry forward that feeling, and to protect both the innocent and the guilty, and those in between, I have decided that I will fictionalize the current audience with a phony name. I name my audience Zsa Zsa.

∞   ∞   ∞   ∞

Dear Zsa Zsa,

In what I shall call "normal times," I maintain tight control over my being, my emotions, my expressions, and my behavior. I am not wholly unemotional, but I express my feelings indirectly, often through wordplay and humor. Although I appear fairly collected and calm, anxiety and fear impel my every movement.

In normal times, I follow an invariable routine, focused on productive activity, until I can no longer be productive because of the tremendous expenditure of energy on staying alert. Then I break down, one way or another.

My favorite way to break down involves terrible Bacchanalia, which I shall not describe in this space but hint at in order both to avoid revealing too much and to further titillate by leaving it to your imagination. For now, I emphasize: terrible Bacchanalia.

Of course these "carnival times" are destructive. At the end of them, and as their consequence as much as due to the effort to control myself during normal times, I am exhausted, beaten, and empty. And the tension throughout my body and psyche is finally gone.

I don't remember ever living my life any other way, including in childhood -- although childhood Bacchanalia typically didn't resemble those of present day. If it is a dysfunctional way to live, it is a lifelong pattern of dysfunction, and those are the most difficult to change.

You see, I recognize the desirability of change. I do not want to face the consequences of the destruction of carnival times. Yet I want to continue to indulge in the intense delectation of carnival, and I want to be able to keep it in my pants, so to speak, as needed for daily life.

I recently came upon a book that reminded me of a thought from a few years ago, on the difference between play and creative activity. I think this is key to finding a way forward. Normal times lack any play. Carnival times are something beyond play, something atavistic and bestial.

Play is goalless, not directed toward production, certainly not economic exchange of any kind. It is done for its own sake. It is not destructive, but nor does it necessarily create something that fulfills a need for anything beyond play itself -- at least, that is not its purpose. Many of the examples of play I can think of immediately are musical: Thelonious Monk's songs and style on piano; Marc Ribot guitar solos; John Fahey's demented restructuring of old folk music.

Imagine living a life like a Thelonious Monk song. Who would need either the normal or the carnival?

Of this, my fair Zsa Zsa, more to come.