Virtual gameplay: value versus fun (Friday 9:00-10:30)
Elizabeth Losh On October 2, 2007, the media reported that the MacArthur Foundation was pulling out of an ambitious plan for a multiplayer game that would teach digitally savvy students by presenting Shakespeare's works in a 3D virtual world. As soon as this funding cut-off of was announced, it stimulated hand-wringing throughout the "serious games" field about the viability of the entire educational videogame movement. For decades, promoters had argued that such games could provide more learner motivation and better measurement of pedagogical objectives by incorporating play to fulfill obligations. Thus, videogames were designed for military practice, preparation of emergency first responders, disease prevention, patient rehabilitation, sensitivity training, conflict resolution, and teaching and learning at all levels, even though - like other gamers - players often "cheated" once the affordances of a system had been learned. The director of the Arden project soon issued a public mea culpa in his blog about the project's failure. As a political economist, who had studied the conflation of labor and leisure in massively multiplayer online role-playing games, he had hoped to use Arden as social laboratory to test different economic models and "to find insights into the way that money works in the real world." However, he summed up the problem simply: "It's no fun . . . You need puzzles and monsters." Arden raised many questions that will be addressed in this paper: about "theories of fun" like Raph Koster's, the limits of the expertise of the university, the principles governing the adaptation of literary works, play's relationship to philanthropy, and the circulation of units of value in real and virtual worlds.
Jake J. Peters Free and open source software (FOSS) is software licensed to guarantee un-ownership, which creates A commons of computer code and makes sure that anyone can play and have fun with making, hacking, tweaking, improving or just messing around with code. What are the politics of extending the possibility for fun - defined as the self-determination to create, act or solve problems in a manner that brings fleeting, satisfying joy - to all through FOSS commons? I use the concept of fun to analyze the FOSS labor process of making something of value with the intent of giving it away - arguing that there is a politics to fun that produces critiques of work, exploitation and the orchestration of bodies to machine time by insisting on the time and space for the human needs of play and fun. For this presentation I seek to analyze the relationships between fun, play, ownership and commons. I argue that the ownership of software produces a contradiction that continually erupts by stopping people in their digital tracks, unable to work or play with proprietary software because the code is closed. What is the material basis, the conditions that must be reproduced, for FOSS work to continue to be fun, for play to begin? In answering this question I will address the importance of centering human needs such as fun or play in analyzing work, and how doing so might help to expand our understanding of politics of working and playing, as well as some analytical limits of theorizations of both fun and play.
Josef Nguyen In games involving role-playing such as World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons, players enter and take action through manipulation of an avatar. Though these avatars can often be described as conceptualized characters independent of the player, they are given life through playing. Drawing from various forms of role-playing games (electronic, tabletop, live-action...), I examine the playing relationship between player and avatar based on factors such as point-of-view, embodied subjectivity, game narrative, in-character versus out-of-character knowledge, and rules. I propose two categories for understanding the player-avatar relationship in role-playing games, 'playing for the avatar' and 'playing as the character,' based primarily on whose point-of-view and subjectivity is dominantly enacted and performed. In 'playing for the avatar,' the avatar serves as a vessel or tool for the player's own subjectivity and consciousness. On the other hand, in 'playing as a character' the player assumes the role of the avatar in a true role-playing performance. In making this distinction, I examine how the player's relationship with the game is shaped by the player's relationship with the avatar. Using my discussion of role-playing games, I argue for a conceptualization of games that merges approaches from both ludology and narratology, framed by analysis drawn from scripted and improvisational theatre. Bodies and Commodities (Friday 10:30-12:00)
Scott Tinley The aesthetic sport of surfing, imported from its mid 19th century Polynesian roots to the post-war beaches of Southern California, stands as an organic example of commodified subculture replete with evolving spatial and documentary moments of both resistance and compliance to the hegemony of dominant corporate ideology. Surfing in America (1950s - present), observed as both a liminal subculture and appropriated image, serves this research project as relational structure to the dominant societal forms that have steadily advanced alongside the fluctuating methods of resistance, essentially defining the subculture. In this project I researched and systematically considered the means, methods and influential factors of resistance toward hegemonic influence within this subculture sport. I used qualitative methodologies to explore first the exemplified methods of co-optation and commodification of surfing (inclusive of its participants, events, codes - in short, its functioning cultural ideology) by for-profit industry, media and peripheral commercial concerns. This data was foundational to the discovery of counter-hegemonic activity as displayed by subculture members. Finally, together with the identification of additional variables such as demographics, region and emergent factors derived from semi-structured interviews, I collected, identified and synthesized data in an effort to establish common factorial elements for resistance or compliance to commodification. My work was structured around discovering and identifying varying ideologies of both individuals and collectives that constitute resistance to participate in the commercialization of surfing. Through my observations, unstructured conversations, semi-structured interviews, personal and active sport participation, data analyses and interpretation, I offer results and significant findings (64 raw data themes collapsed into 3 central constructs) for further consideration by colleagues, peers and social scientists.
Cristina F. Rosa This research excavates the Yoruba concepts of asé (generative and performative force), sere/xire (serious play) and eré (child play), and their intertextual presence within the Afro-Brazilian practice of capoeira. In Yoruba, "to play with people" should be understood as an essential part of the socio-political organization. Unlike Western (capitalist) societies, where play is commonly defined in opposition to productive work, within communities where the African presence is significant, "to play" is a "mode of activity", which permeates both sacred and every day life realms. Serious play (sere) points to the dynamics and inventiveness of play at work. Furthermore, Xire, the concept of party or celebration found in Afro-Brazilian cultural contexts such as Camdomble, is an intricate and important part of that religious structure. The party, not only the final product but also the process that its preparation requires, the amount of effort, the money and the energy the community puts into it, pull the community together and contributes to the preservation of their identity. First, I will trace the process through which corporeal memory and improvisational performance have inscribed these foundational concepts into daily activities in (post) colonial Brazil. Secondly, I will articulate the interplay between these concepts and ginga or jogo-de-cintura (hip-play), the basic movement in capoeira. The oscillatory and ambiguous movement of the waist in space, or hip-play, constructs a dynamic corporeality (or identity-as-movement), largely influenced by Africanist aesthetic and intensified by the Brazilian structures of political and economical inequalities.
Annie Tucker Disability studies distinguish impairment or idiosyncrasy from the condition of disability, emphasizing the performative construction of difference. Able-ist approaches codify the disabled body's interactions with others and environment, far too often denying the pleasure and power that can be found in the lived experience of "different" physicality. Bill Shannon is an innovative performer with Perthes disease, a rare form of hip degeneration, who disrupts such prohibitive constructions. He crafts specialized crutches using salvaged rubber, combining them with a skateboard to create hybrid built-to-order prosthetics. Through guerilla-style street theater, which he performs as "Crutchmaster," and his documentation of its results on the web, Shannon innovates techniques of mobility, awareness, and articulation, re-scripting encounters between different bodies through bold negotiations of urban terrain. Crutchmaster's choreographies flip the popular signification of disability and align him with other street practices such as parkour and graffiti, similar deviant urban tactics which flout the rules and expectations of panoptic power structures to gleefully endanger the normative project and reclaim public space that is perceived as disabled or disabling. This alignment invites a re-theorization of prosthetic embodiment, which may come to resemble an extreme sport in its specialized thrills, and speaks to the concept of "deep play," both in the Geertzian sense, where play functions as social commentary and involves considerable risk, and as defined by naturalist Diane Ackerman to indicate a heightened state of concentration and capacity. Thus, a disability studies perspective proves to be a powerful tool in theorizing the subversive and creative power of physical play. Economies of Work and Plays (Friday 1:30-3:00)
Rachel A. Wortman Often when thinking about the manner in which Shakespeare's plays posited some critique of the politics and culture of the Elizabethan era, individuals immediately jump to the texts themselves or the staging of the works. Here, rather, I want to investigate the space of the play. Taking as my point of departure Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, specifically his examination of the site of theatre both culturally and topologically in an effort to understand more broadly the implications of theatre on and of the margin, I want to investigate both the actual sites of the theatres themselves and the territories across which most audience members would have had to travel to and from the sites of "play". It is my contention that what we should begin to consider as the theatre's larger "play"ground - created by its distance from the city centre - significantly contributed to the threat theatergoers began to pose to those of the ruling classes. For in having to travel between the theatre and the city, the space for thought, observation, and reflection upon "play" opened up. Furthermore, by tracing the routes of travel, I look to argue that Shakespeare's plays did not represent an immediate martial threat, but they suggested the possibility of a reordered world, in a marginal space, that existed distant from the place of the dominant order. It is the "play"ground rather than the play itself that intervenes and informs the critique of Elizabethan politics, culture, and society. Robin S. Stewart "Play with thy Peer:" The York Corpus Christi Plays and the Concept of Medieval Recreation Perhaps no book has been more influential upon critical perspectives of Medieval recreation and play than Mikhail Baktin's "Rablelais and His World," wherein he articulates his notion of the carnival and how it operates in the social, religious, and political order of Medieval and Renaissance community. His notion of the carnivalesque extends beyond the mere confines of his historical subject, however, by offering us an account of the political dimensions of "play," wherein systems of authority can be inverted and hierarchies dismantled for a brief period of time: "[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age" (Baktin 10). However, this paper explores a concurrent phenomenon in the social and religious life of Medieval England, one which invokes a notion of "play" similar to Baktin's yet seeks to transform this temporary aspect of "play" into a more permanent and spiritually beneficial form of "work." The Corpus Christi plays were at once festive celebrations and also expressions of sincere piety. The paper approaches the tension between these two perspectives by first addressing the most notable attacks against the plays, the Lollard informed "Treatise Against Miracle Playing," where the author objects to the miracle plays precisely on the grounds that "play" implies an equality of degree, one which is blasphemous when applied to the "work" of God: ... when we take in play and in jest the miracles of God, he, taking from us his grace, says earnestly to us, "play not with me but play with thy peer." (94) Through close readings of the plays themselves and considerations of certain theological concepts informing them, the paper argues that the Corpus Christi plays demonstrate a spiritual perspective which permits the sensuality of physical "play" to construct representations of divine objects that aid in the "work" of spiritual contemplation and edification. To the performers and audience of the Corpus Christi plays, the recreation of theater becomes the "re-creation" of Christ's passion, both physical and spiritual, which in turn "plays" upon the emotions of the audience to "re-create" them spiritually.
Amy Collins In July of 1860, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "A Musical Instrument" was published in the Cornhill Magazine alongside an illustration by Lord Leighton which depicts a stern, aged, and bearded Pan in the process of playing the pipes he has just constructed. Pan's play is both destructive and productive as the driving force of the commodification of art; the "hacked and hewed" (15) remnants of flora that lurk below Pan's massive hooves in the river bed offer an unsettling picture of the pillaged natural world at the expense of artistic progress. Almost artificial in their delicate, refined form, the pan-pipes represent an instrument of culture, and suggest the transition of poetry from oral tradition to material object of the industrial world. The pastoral playfulness with which poetry was formerly associated has given way to market value--what was once a leisure activity has become a means of employment and livelihood. I will examine the implications of Pan's 'mythological play' in the poem as an allegory for the role of the poet/poetess in Victorian society, trapped between writing for pleasure and for income. EBB's literary heroine, Aurora Leigh, identifies the poet's struggle as "work[ing] with one hand for the booksellers / While working with the other for [one]self / and art." How does our perception of poetry and the poet change when the motivation is work versus play? How did this affect the reception and value of poetry in the Victorian period? Play, in practice: serious fantasies? (Friday 3:00-4:30)
Robert Wood Played entered the everyday vocabulary of anarchist activists during the anti-globalization protests of the late '90's and the turn of the century. This took a variety of forms within the protests themselves, including the use of puppets, theatrical elements, and cheerleading. It also entered into the political conceptualizations that those movements developed. The idea of play was taken on most by the group Crimethinc, who produced a number of essays as well as a book, Days of War, Nights of Love. This work has been extremely influential within U.S. youth anarchist politics. This work draws much of its explicit influence from French Situationist politics, and has an unrecognized debt to both surrealism and dada, as well as new left groups such as the Yippies and diggers. The basic premise of the group is that play constitutes a free realm that naturally opposes itself to the regimented and instrumentalized logic of both state and capital. Play then becomes both a tactic of resistance and an act of creation of a world in which such logic does not dominate. This utopian vision becomes troubled when we look at the role that play takes on within the contemporary world system. Paulo Virno notes that precisely the qualities that Crimethinc link with the freedom of play, constitute cynicism, fear, and opportunism, which increasingly define contemporary modes of social control. Play is both completely commodified, and linked into networks of control. Rather dismissing play because of this, my argument would be that it precisely of this fact, that play enters the space of politics. Following Foucault's arguments concerning sexuality, it is precisely the moment that play becomes productive for power, that it too becomes a site of resistance. In effect the increasing role of play within radical politics acts as marker of the radical shifts in the class struggle in both Fordist and Post-Fordist politics. I want to make this argument by reading this anarchist tradition against itself, and look at the way the concept of play has been imagined within science fiction more productively, capturing both its ambiguity and productivity for power and resistance.
Natilee Harren In 1965, the Fluxus artists George Brecht and Robert Filliou opened up a shop at 12 Rue de May in Ville franche-sur-mer, a small seaside village outside of Nice, France. Their shop was called La Cédille qui sourit, or "The Cedilla That Smiles." They called their shop a "Center of Permanent Creation," as they were continuously producing jokes, games, research, recipes, poems, drawings, puzzles, events and letters. Filliou, in his broken English, has recalled that the Cédille was "a sort of workshop and of shop, of non shop would we say now [sic], for we were never commercially registered, and the Cédille was always shut, opening only upon request of visitors to our home." The Cédille was an artistic project that took a critical stance against instrumental production and means-ends rationality by relying upon an anti-logic of play, suspense, dematerialization, failure, and opting out. This paper is one of the very first attempts to take Brecht and Filliou's experiments at the Cédille seriously, considering it both within and outside the context of the Fluxus movement (1962-68), which was devoted to undermining established systems of value exchange (of galleries, museums, schools and beyond). Through a close examination of particular objects and conceptual projects that emerged out of the Cédille, and in conversation with Hannah Arendt's theory of labor vs. work vs. action, this paper fleshes out the powerfully ambivalent position of the shop and its activities as Brecht and Filliou tested out ways of undermining all forms of objectification. What they attempted to create instead was an artistic practice - and ultimately, a livelihood - that supported genuine human relationships through sharing, exchange, and crucially, play.
Dr. Natasha Grigorian Paul Valéry's melodrama Sémiramis was first performed at the Opéra de Paris in 1934 to the music of Arthur Honegger. As well as being an innovative theatrical play, the melodrama represents the play of the artistic imagination, given Valéry's flexible treatment of the legendary subject matter. Furthermore, Sémiramis is a remarkable work in which diverse art forms are closely intertwined. In many ways, it is a 'spectacle total' ('Gesamtkunstwerk'), in the Wagnerian sense, that combines the declamation of a poetic text, music, choreography, dramatic action, and spectacular stage and costume design. This paper considers anew the artistic links between Sémiramis and Sergei Diaghilev's famous ballet company, the Ballets Russes (active in Paris in 1909-1929). On close inspection, such links are substantial and quite indispensable for a deeper understanding of Valéry's melodrama. Not only did Valéry (1871-1945) personally attend performances of the Ballets Russes in Paris, especially in 1910, and preserve a lifelong admiration for the ballets and their creators; but moreover, both the producer and the choreographer of Sémiramis in 1934 were ultimately major stars from the Diaghilev team. The paper focuses on a comparative analysis of Sémiramis and the ballet Schéhérazade (produced by Diaghilev in Paris in 1910). In what ways does our awareness of parallels and contrasts between the two works shed light on the author's play of fantasy in Sémiramis? And to what extent is the synthesis of different art forms in Valéry's melodrama symptomatic of early twentieth-century French culture? These are some of the questions that this paper invites to explore. To be accompanied by fascinating images. Playing with Institutions: laughter, gender, identity (Saturday 9:00-10:30)
Scott Patrick Murphy Humorous realities and the comic dimensions of human experience provide insights into how play organizes group life. Through analysis of data gathered over the last two years for on ongoing ethnographic study on a small friendship group of retired white men meeting over morning coffee at a corner donut shop, this paper explains how these men initiate jocular encounters with strangers in the shop by playing with institutionalized meanings (see Zijderveld 1995) to form temporary laughter groups. The paper also explains how humor orgies (see Fry 1963) are accomplished by joke-piggybacking among group members.
Lisa Harris This paper will demonstrate how 'playing with one's food' enables a more critically engaged representation of food in literature. The majority of theory in gendering foodways tends towards a structural analysis of how men and women negotiate their subjectivity through how and what they eat. Yet there is little work on how food as a ludic element of culture resists gender and socialization, and how writers play with expectations around the dining table. Hiromi Goto, a contemporary Japanese Canadian writer, intervenes in gender binaries and the resulting ambiguity is articulated through food. The body is no longer a place of singularity in Goto's writing as her characters are rarely Japanese or Canadian, male or female, but rather enjoy multiplicity over convention. Goto's magic realism requires her readers to abandon their understanding of what vegetables such as mushrooms and cucumbers are capable of, as her narrative opens up diverse possibilities in food beyond the divisions of nationality and gender. I would agree with Warren Motte's (1995) request to abandon the 'play' versus 'seriousness' binary opposition in favor of a dynamic process where the play-fullness of the text is paramount. I argue that Goto embraces the 'play-fullness' of food; she narrates the material contradictions inherent in certain foods to demonstrate the limits of theorizing food as 'male' or 'female'. Rather than confining foods to an either/or gender binary, Hiromi Goto enables food to switch between fe/maleness and thus playfully sidesteps the logic of characterization that dominates much of the politics of identity.
Hannah Godwin In this paper, I read Riddle 33 in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book as a point of entry into the challenges of deciphering meaning out of an ancient linguistic game that revels in word play and is further complicated by the process of translation. The Old English vernacular riddles of the 11th century Exeter Book are some of the most puzzling pieces of Anglo-Saxon literature. The linguistic structure of riddles purposes to trick the riddle and delights in obfuscating meaning. A striking anthropomorphic example of the complex affiliation between humans and the natural world, Riddle 33 reveals a place where the dichotomous relationship between simultaneously unforgiving and nurturing nature is portrayed through a metaphorical female body that demonstrates the creative processes of birth and speech. While numerous scholars note that the obvious answer to Riddle 33 is an iceberg that may be represented as a woman warrior, I contend that the language of sorcery that pervades this riddle encourages a further questioning of what this iceberg may mean. By closely examining the variety in translations of specific words pertaining to witchcraft, I will illustrate the ambiguity of the language and highlight the manifold possibilities of interpretation and meaning this powerful riddle opens up. I intend to answer the following questions. Which witch is she, the healing witch who oversees processes of childbirth and creation, or is she the slayer, the terrifying dream stalker, with haunting laughter that resounds to the land of men? Or is she both? Intellectual Play (Saturday 10:30-12:00)
Michael Graziano The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard's famous "report on knowledge," is powerful for its concepts of language games, the metanarratives that legitimate them, and the incredulity towards those metanarratives that marks "postmodernity." But as Lawrence Klein has noted, "postmodernism has its own grand narrative": in making his argument in favor of a new "paralogy" to replace metanarrative, Lyotard himself must wade into the shifting waters of intellectual language games. It's a task he performs with artful care, allowing him to weave a convincing story of the rise and fall of the knowledge-legitimating metanarratives of the Enlightenment and beyond. Lyotard presents himself as a "philosopher," but he is fully aware of advantages and perils that accompany the analytic-philosophical language game. To skirt these issues, he makes use of his own narrative's ability to "perform" a task beyond its explicit argument, hinting his way towards the prescriptive capacity he finds lacking in analytic philosophy. I will address the ways in which the "Report on Knowledge" "plays" language games, situating itself within the interlocking and overlapping network of academic language games. I'll also argue that this situatedness is important - perhaps vital - to his argument.
Buddy Hoar Can experience of the aesthetic yield particular knowledge? Around every response to this problem looms, to this day, the specter of Kant. While Kant concedes to aesthetic judgments the harmonic Spiel [play] of the imagination and understanding, such freedom comes at the cost of epistemic value and moral interest. In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer reads the Critique of Judgment against the grain, finding in Kant's formulation of the claim of the aesthetic a valorization of art that "speaks to us in a significant and definite way" (51). Gadamer rehabilitates the potential of the aesthetic to generate knowledge by first reimagining the concept of play. For Gadamer, play insists on a posture ontologically equivalent to what he will term "hermeneutic openness" to the other, the unknown, and the singular in history. British novelist Martin Amis endorses and elaborates this productive aesthetics in his formally audacious novel on the Holocaust, Time's Arrow. On the level of diegesis, the Nazi-narrator's effort to deny his part in Auschwitz is constantly frustrated by the alternate temporality of play with aesthetic objects as varied as portraits and bell-bottoms. The novel's inverted "bell-bottom" temporality likewise calls for the reader's playful engagement with form in order to restore comic quotidian scenes and the vivid tragedy of the death-camps. Aesthetic play tests the reader's hermeneutic openness, drawing her or him into a position approximating that of the witness. Like play for Gadamer, history for Amis is not a brute fact but an intimate relation that must be reaffirmed in every reading.
Natalie Strobach In Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, he criticizes the intellectual's amor intellectualis, which nurtures "...a temptation for those engaged in theoretical or artistic work to relax their spiritual demands on themselves, to drop their standards, to indulge..." (28-29) This amor frees the intellectual from inhibitions for a play with one's self or self-stimulation of sorts and allows him to follow - as Adorno terms it - the "itching in one's finger-tips." He witnesses the amor as the instance that the author toys with use of "banal or pedantic verbal configurations." Adorno insists that artists resist such urges, in order to eschew conformity and thus barbarism. He speaks of resistance and of the forbidden, which - in conjunction with the linguistic insistence of sexual overtones - invokes a sense of shame and passes over the benefits of any intellectual playfulness. Adorno posits a curious amalgamation of barbarism and conformity that affects the dialogue between both the intellectual's body and the intellectual's body of work as a negotiation with impulse and desire. This paper will explore the concepts of play and playfulness with language as indulgence and as instances of succumbing to linguistic and literary temptation. Furthermore, it will attempt to investigate Adorno's relationship to play and shame - particularly with a look at artistic impulse as a masturbatory act. This will involve a look at Adorno and fellow Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin's views on art after industrialization or mechanization and Adorno's writings on the obsolescence of poetry after WWII. Creative Re/writing (Saturday 1:30-3:00)
Melissa Haynes Harryette Mullen's fifth book of poetry, Sleeping With the Dictionary, is perfectly described as "serious play". Mullen's background as a poet who draws inspirations from the Black Arts Movement as well as the avant-garde L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Oulipo groups has informed a poetics that uses pleasure to affect social and political change. In Sleeping With the Dictionary, the trope of childhood is used to denaturalize language and create a more interactive, socially empowering literacy in the reader. Mullen also plays with de-contextualized identity-coded language (in particular, racially coded language) in order to allow only partial understanding of the work, which has the democratizing effect of undermining mastery over language. A repeated eroticizing of wordplay suggests pleasure and procreation as effects of difference, encouraging readers to use humor and desire as political strategies to confront unfamiliar or even hostile language. Through her use of play in these various forms, Mullen allows herself and all readers to function as Foucauldian "specific intellectuals" who can use their particular experience to play a role in diversifying sources of truth.
Elizabeth Alsop Filmmaker Chantal Akerman once wrote, "If I make cinema, it is because of what I do not dare do in writing." In this paper, I argue that Akerman's 1974 film Je tu il elle constitutes a sustained exploration of the enhanced physical and conceptual space afforded by cinema - a medium which, as Akerman's comment suggests, she found inherently conducive to experimentation and play. Je tu il elle dramatizes such experimental play: specifically, Akerman's attempts to forge a new sort of cinematic language - one which works to rewrite, or overwrite, the prevailing tropes of the (mostly male) auteur tradition. To this end, my paper argues, Akerman posits the body as an instrument of filmic writing. Through a close reading of the film, I demonstrate that Akerman's "incarnated" discourse is inscribed both by the body (by means of performance and gesture), and on the body (which is positioned, at times, as a cinematic screen). At the same time, I also analyze diegetic representations of writing, in order to suggest how much Akerman's discursive strategies may owe to Derridean notions of writing, bricolge, and semantic "freeplay." The result - embodied not only by Je tu il elle, but by later works like Jeanne Dielmann (1975) and Nuit et Jour (1991) - is a cinematic écriture that emphasizes materiality, performativity, and duration, and thus, necessarily resists attempts at narrative condensation.
Erin Trapp Freud's essay, "On Creative Writers and Day-dreaming [Phantasieren]," turns the question of how writers write into a primer on fantasy, something which he grounds in the fantasy-playing of children. Returning to creative writers at the end, he describes the effect of art on the viewer as the work of "forepleasure [Vorlust]" - something he uses to describe the various pleasures of infantile sexuality, jokes, creative, and stage-acting - "the pleasure that serves to initiate a large release of pleasure." 1 In a sense, play describes not only the similarity between artistic creation and children's games, but also the process of "identifying" with constructions of fantasy. But playing can also be seen, in light of "forepleasure," to serve a separate function, one which is at work in child's play as well as in the work of art: the act (and cultural accomplishment) of renunciation. These scattered references to "forepleasure" disappear in Freud's later work, giving way to the logic of deferment, but as I will explore in this essay, "forepleasure" possesses its own logic, one that follows Freud's rough, apologetic understanding of aesthetics.2 It is this logic that is operative in thinking that would find "value" in depression (perhaps as an alternative to the logic of repression/expression), and in thinking about aesthetics as the autonomous conflict of passivity and activity. In his essays, "Berlin Walls (1969)," and "The Value of Depression (1963)," D.W. Winnicott equates the healthy individual with a model of divided Berlin. "If they have fogs there," he writes, this represents "the depressed mood." The rearrangements that follow from the lifting of the fog, in the model, would result in the "shifting" of the wall from West to East, or from East to West, something which, he notes, "cannot happen in Berlin." The fact of this fantasy is great, and it is this logic which is what I have described above as the logic of forepleasure, something which, like the Berlin Wall, insists that "human nature is not capable of totality." Child's Play: Interpretive and Filmic Frames (Saturday 3:00-4:30)
Michelle Cho This paper situates D.W. Winnicott's theory of playing and transitional objects/spaces in the visual and narrative arena of Park Chan-Wook's 2006 film, Saibogujiman Gwenchana [I'm a Cyborg but That's OK]* in order to address the following aims: a) to reexamine the limitations of Winnicott's object relations theory, for its ostensibly normalizing tendencies, and b) to argue for the relevance of object relations psychoanalysis for film studies. Park's film might seem, at first, an overly literal object for such an exploration, given it's mental hospital setting and the fact that I'm a Cyborg but That's OK marks, according to many critics, a transition in style and subject matter from Park's earlier, more well known works (i.e. Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 3 Extremes, or JSA). I would argue, however, that the encounter between Winnicott and I'm a Cyborg but That's OK illuminates both the film, which has proved to be unintelligible to both domestic, Korean and international audiences according to conventional generic paradigms and provides an occasion to explore the visualization of what remains narrowly constrained to the analytic scene in Winnicott's texts. Winnicott's definition of play centers on the preservation of a paradox: that the question of whether the object was created or discovered not be formulated in the case of the transitional object or transitional phenomena. For Winnicott, the irresolution of this paradox is itself the means by which contact with reality is achieved. The suspension of inside/outside and reality/fantasy in playing is what enables a person to make the distinction in later stages of development-a counterintuitive notion of normalization and "health." In addition to visualizing this space of suspended distinctions between reality and fantasy, internal and external reality, Park's film enacts, precisely through this portrayal, a logic of social relations that depends upon the establishment of transitional objects/spaces, which highlights the role of filmic experience in the consideration of playing as the only viable response to reality's demand for the management of difference. *It's important to note that the original Korean title lacks the identifying pronoun of the international English title and thus preserves an important sense of ambiguity - it may be understood as "I'm a Cyborg but That's OK," "You're a Cyborg but That's OK" or "It's a Cyborg but That's OK."
Brandon Granier "A little boy went out to play. When he opened his door, he saw the world. As he passed through the doorway, he caused a reflection.... Evil was born, and followed the boy...." So opens David Lynch's film, Inland Empire, a collection of cinematic reflections, insofar as one considers cinema to project these evils. Inland Empire indicts play - acting out roles - as the Hollywood evil which sets Nikki Grace/Laura Dern spinning helplessly around a psychological downward spiral. Nikki suffers the identity fragmentation broken across the different roles she plays, from (the ostensible) prostitute to actress and wife of a Polish aristocrat jealous of her infidelity initiated by a womanizing co-star. Dramatic play incites schizophrenia, and Lynch portrays this process through the cinematic reflection which film presents to Nikki's observing ego. In witnessing her filmic characters play out disparate roles, she can no longer distinguish her real self from the cinematic fantasies which she has lived out on stage. My paper analyzes Nikki's character as an artist in the Freudian sense of one who fashions fantasies into "precious reflections of reality": "in a certain fashion [the artist] actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be..." (Freud 224, Two Principles of Mental Functioning). It was Lynch's professed intention to represent a psychological fugue with Inland Empire, and his portrayal lances a meta-commentary on the subversion of the reality principle by the pleasure principle in a postmodern age; play usurps reality for Nikki and for us.
Jared Russell Nietzsche writes, "A man's maturity - consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play." This presentation considers psychoanalysis as offering just such a "maturity," both of self and of science. To appreciate the seriousness of clinical experience as play is to encounter what it means to work with a dynamic unconscious, which developmental and cognitive psychologies have altogether dispensed with. Particular attention will be devoted to Winnicott's concept of playing, with respect to the relationship between being and doing, as well as the distinction between object relations and object usage. Where the practice of free association facilitates, in Winnicott's terms, the "overlap of two areas of playing," interpretation maintains the essential ambiguity inherent in clinical play. By opening up unconscious fantasy to uncertainty and illusion by means of interpretation, psychoanalysis encourages the symbolization of inner experience. A brief clinical vignette will demonstrate this point. It is argued that a psychoanalytic understanding of the concept of play requires thinking about the clinical frame as a transitional or potential time and space - a kind of time that is potentially a space, and a kind of space that is potentially time. An interpretive framework provides a transitional environment that is neither space nor time classically conceived, where time and space transition into one another, and in such a way that the recovery of what it means to be a child, at play, is made possible. |
