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

the end of semester blues, sorta

It's finally getting close to the end of this wretched semester and academic year. Some nice things happen at the end of a semester, and I've needed nice things lately for reasons I won't go into, to avoid ranting.

One nice thing is last teaching days, and the relief that provides. Another are the rituals of closing shop - clearing out the inbox, filling the recycling bin with obsolete memos and old papers, the final faculty meetings.

Far better are the lovely exchanges of appreciation. It's amazing how much it means to me to hear that my course was significant, helpful, interesting, or inspiring. I'm collecting a few of those already. I have two students this semester in a GE class who have previously taken another GE class with me. I've seen them as first year students and now seniors. They deliberately chose my class to complete their upper division GE requirement, because of their good experience in the lower division course. They've recently let me know that.

I've also received unsolicited, unexpected, and much needed expressions of appreciation from faculty I represent in the California Faculty Association. I do a lot of work for faculty, and I nonetheless get a lot of flak, much of it illogical, about my representation and advocacy.

It's bittersweet. I have regrets, I made mistakes, I have frustrations, but I also have successes, victories, and joys.

(Yep, I had joys this semester. It just hasn't seemed that many in the face of all the negativity.)

Academic Year 2011-2012: A Year That Will Soon Be Flushed Down The Toilet.

good day

Today was a good day. My Bioethics class was pretty good – there were some good questions about Foucault’s critique of scientific discourse, and its application to the scientific discourse of medicine (through Canguilhem). My class is populated largely by nursing students who take the course to fulfill both the humanities GE requirement and their own program’s requirement for ethics education. The recent course material presented them with some serious intellectual challenges, and I decided to spend the class session today reviewing some of the concepts and trying to lead them to a deeper appreciation of the meaning of the critique for their own (future and present) practices.

One student asked a question about exactly that, and framed it in a very intriguing way. She prefaced by saying that for the last two weeks we’ve been discussing these issues, she has struggled in her nursing classes with accepting the assertions about medical conditions, diseases and deviations from “normal” physical conditions. If this is the “freedom” that Foucault’s critique leads to – the free choice regarding how and to what disciplinary practices and discourses we submit and subject ourselves through – then, she remarked, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Another student remarked that she was also struggling with that.

Score! A sort of ultimate ideal of teaching, for me, is to create the conditions under which a student can produce a powerful critical knowledge that matters for them intellectually and personally. Basically, when students are upset, I win. (I’m putting that in a deliberately contentious way.) Then another student chimed in on the same subject, objecting to Foucault’s critique in one of the classic ways – that his critique doesn’t tell us how to make ongoing social arrangements we rely on continue to work.

This is a class I’ve struggled with. It’s a good class – even a little too good, if you catch my meaning – and it’s been hard to provoke them to talk about the ethical questions I’ve tried to pose to them. There have been occasions over the semester when it has seemed they’ve been awake and aware on the level I’ve wanted to reach – a level of fairly significant discomfort, frankly. But I never felt I’ve been able to keep them working, thinking, and upset at that level.

After class, two very academically prepared students waited to ask about their term papers, and another student engaged in the discussion waited to ask more questions about Foucault. One of the students was asking where my office was, so she could talk to me during my official hours. Instead, faced with all four of them, I decided to hold my office hour just outside our classroom.

We spent the next hour together – partly talking about their term papers, but also about the discussion in class, what it meant for them in their future practice, how it was affecting their approach to their university lives, what we’d been discussing in class meant in the grand scheme of things medical…

And the magical thing happened, that all of us who teach for a living dream of. Without any prompting, without any provocation, they kept bringing issues, articles, discussions, themes, concepts, and moods and intuitions, that the course was built around, together, in their own discussion, their own understanding. It became clear from their discussion that all we’ve talked about, all we’ve read and discussed, has made a tremendous difference to them, has made them wonder, doubt, and think. I just can’t say how good that felt.

Like I said, it was an hour. I realized the time that had elapsed when the conversation finally slowed, and we realized we had our various places to go. The clock in the hall told me I had not only failed to get to my office for my official office time after class, but had spent twice that time there.

These are incredibly rare moments. They are what makes teaching worthwhile. I’m inexpressibly grateful to you today, gang.

NOT the year in review, part 4

I'm thinking about joy and music today. So:

Shakespeare, Sonnet #8

Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy;
Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?

If the true concord of well-tunèd sounds
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear:

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother,
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'Thou single wilt prove none.'