Comments on: Play

By: Shamus Khan

Shamus Khan — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:51:55 +0000

Just a quick topical note that the NYTimes magazine has a story on “taking play seriously“.

By: Craig Forney

Craig Forney — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:53:49 +0000

Thanks for the fascinating discussion on play. Corporate power strongly mediates the experience of watching games, but I’m not sure how it undercuts the quality of play for the athlete in the heat of the competition or for the mindful observer of the action. Play still seems to be a transcendent quality. I also enjoyed the comparisons on baseball, football, and basketball. My thesis is that the three sports express three elements of American culture, present in all time periods rather than each being a reflection of a particular era. Baseball seems to illustrate the eschatological aspect of the national worldview, a vision forward rather than back. Therefore, it generated incredible attentiveness for people in the midst of the Bronx, Brooklyn, North Side of Chicago, Southern California, and in rural parts of the country. Basketball is improvisational but with more scripted plays than baseball; the latter is the most spontaneous, a game of prophetical imagination for abundant freedom comes when individuals will act from self-direction.

By: Shamus Khan

Shamus Khan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:52:34 +0000

This reminds me of Homo Ludens, which I must confess I have not read in years (could it now be counted in decades?). But what I recall liking about Huizinga was his argument about play being central to the constitution of culture and not simply a reflection of it (Geertz’s play as society in miniature). That and the reminder that play is not somehow outside of life but the stuff of it. It surprises me that we don’t know a lot more about “play” or in particular that sociologists don’t study play more seriously. The greatest collective phenomena in America besides religion is likely to be sport…

By: John Torpey

John Torpey — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 22:30:13 +0000

This is very entertaining, but — despite having taught at Williams — he has apparently never seen a hockey game. Hockey players spit at least as much as baseball players, and frequently blow their noses by holding one nostril closed and blowing forcefully out the other nostril. You don’t see that everyday, and you don’t see it on any baseball fields that I’m aware of. Many hockey players apparently have never heard of Norbert Elias.

Taylor also fails to appreciate the truly religious experience of skating on a newly frozen pond, with the temperature below freezing and nothing but that sheet of pristine ice, a stick, a puck, and someone to play with — ideally, with a dozen people to play with, and at least some sort of net. It’s much better than anything that could take place on television, although the NHL recently televised an outdoor game played in these conditions (actually, with snow added) before something like 70,000 people in Buffalo’s football stadium. The snow slowed everything down and made playing more complicated, as it is wont to do, but everyone seems to have loved the experience — players and fans alike. Now that’s play for you….

By: Clark West

Clark West — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:24:21 +0000

Mark, all those years studying with you and I never knew that you too bleed Carolina blue! Thank you for this wonderful piece—I am very grateful for your having taught me how to keep the play alive in my writing and academic work.

By the way, does George Carlin know you’re ripping him off on the baseball/football riff?

By: Jay Murray

Jay Murray — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:07:21 +0000

@Tom Asher:

‘As for organized basketball, that has become less a revelation and more a matter of big business even at the college level’.

Undeniable that the gobs of money involved in college basketball have a corrupting influence—but isn’t this a precipitously wholesale dismissal? Are all college programs corrupted in the same way or to the same extent? Does the fact that pro football is ‘more a matter of big business’ and pro baseball is ‘more a matter of big business’ and college basketball is ‘more a matter of big business’ elide the differences between them in terms of style, hierarchy, ruling metaphors, etc.? And does any of this really exclude the possibility of revelation or pedagogy?

By: Jay Murray

Jay Murray — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:58:12 +0000

I hate to quibble with a scholar who correctly recognizes that Chapel Hill is the ’southern side of heaven’, but … regarding Professor Taylor’s opening comments about multi-user online games, I wonder whether there really is a distinction between the skills suited to the trading floor and the playing field–at least where these skills concern the eternal Now. I’ll resist the temptation to make anti-Wall Street jibes about impractical and purposeless activity; instead, I’d like to ask how we might in principle distinguish between play and gambling—if we take up the usual canard that trading stocks, speculation, etc., are simply respectable forms of gambling. Reliance on chance, putting one’s assets at risk partly for the thrill, learning how to deal with Fate—why isn’t all of this playful in a deep sense?

Go Heels!

By: Tom Asher

Tom Asher — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:15:36 +0000

I enjoyed your entry greatly, but wonder if it would be productive if more scholars thought through D.W. Winnicott or Benjamin rather than Heidegger and Kierkegaard when it comes to play. Play in those former arguments is mimetic — not transcendent — and a lot of hard work to boot. Of course, by reading play as a matter of mimesis and a matter of becoming another, which has an ethics of its own, it may work better to read the stories and actions of Hindu gods (or even Greek ones) through play and leave to the salvation religions another framework altogether.

As for organized basketball, that has become less a revelation and more a matter of big business even at the college level.