​

Writing, just like human experience, is inherently ambiguous, and therefore somehow at odds with itself. Both are forms of representation; writing seeks to represent things or meanings by way of symbols, and human experience seeks to represent our environment and reality by way of physiology. The trouble is that both have a tendency to appear as if they are themselves the thing that they represent. Indeed, they seem fundamentally to rely on this illusion in order to function in the first place. If we were constantly marvelling at the thought that our experience of vision is actually a result of electro-chemical signals in our brains, it would be difficult for us to walk down the street. And similarly, if we were constantly noticing that each word we read is not actually the thing it refers to, but simply an arrangement of symbols to bring the idea of that thing into our mind, then we would have a hard time getting to the end of a sentence. In other words, they must lie to us, in attempting to tell the truth.

It is this quality of representation – that of illusion – upon which the Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte plays in his most famous work, The Treachery of Images. The word ‘illusion’ derives from the Latin ‘ludere’ – ‘to play’, and it is easy enough for us to see how illusion entails a sort of play. When our senses are deceived, it seems that a trick ‘has been played’ upon us – that someone, or perhaps even the universe itself, has derived some degree of amusement from our temporary confusion; a momentary loss of bearings gives us the disorientation enjoyed in humour, quickly resolved. It is, for instance, what makes the game of ‘peekaboo’ funny for babies; the appearance is given by a person that they have disappeared, and then, hilariously, they reveal that they have in fact been there all along. Except that with representation, it seems to be the other way round – the thing we imagined to be there (the thing a word refers to, or even more conservatively, such a thing as definitive meaning) is revealed to have been absent all along.

As representation, then, language is inherently a kind of playing of, and with, words (for Wittgenstein it is sprachspiel, ‘language games’; for Derrida, jeu libre, ‘free play’). Indeed, the experience of language that I am feeling into and attempting to cultivate in writing these words, is one that is attentive to this inherent playfulness. As the words fall onto the page, they appear almost to write themselves – to be playing with each other as in a sort of game, which is determined by a set of rules. These rules are what we might otherwise call ‘grammar’. The writing of one word comes to determine, according to the rules of the English language, what it is possible for the next word to be, in a sort of revelation of thought that resembles the dynamic of peekaboo that I discussed earlier. The potential for my thought is there (wherever ‘there’ is - In my head? In some sort of cultural ether?) – veiled, or not yet fully present to me – and it is through the game of writing that it unfolds or becomes revealed to me, and that I come to realise or actualise my self. “Language,” writes Pierre Bayard, serves “to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality”.

In some way, it is the precisely the ‘rules of the English language – the limiting constraints of its grammar – that are enabling me to create this sentence (or indeed any sentence). David Fleming explains (appropriately, with reference to games) –

We might begin to see an analogy here with ideology which, as Robert Grubin describes, is “at once the matrix from which creativity is born and the barrier against which it strains”. Indeed, to the extent that games are ‘closed systems’ involving a set of rules which (if we want to continue playing the game) are not to be broken, then they are in a sense ideological. Play is what happens when – through such qualities as skill, strength, strategy, determination, competition, cooperation, imagination, luck, humour, fun etc. – those constraints are pushed to the very limits of what is possible within them, and become gateways to creativity. In this regard, play – which is inherently creative – tends to be richest at the edge or limits of that which constrains it. I suppose I am trying to find and to walk that edge in this dissertation…

But is what I am doing – writing a dissertation – not meant to be work, rather than play? In Playing & Reality, D.W. Winnicott notes a certain continuity between the playing of children and the attentional states required to do work – “To get to the idea of playing it is helpful to think of the preoccupation that characterizes the playing of a young child. The content does not matter. What matters is the withdrawal state, akin to the concentration of older children and adults”. Such continuity seems to challenge the binarism that typically characterises our understanding of working and playing, and indeed our understanding in general . We might say that whether or not something is playing or working is determined less by its ‘object’, but rather by the quality of attention that is brought to it.

Insofar, then, as work involves language (or more fundamentally, insofar as it involves attention or perception itself), it also involves the dynamics of play, or at least the potential for those dynamics to be realised attitudinally. What determines whether we experience an activity as work or play seems, in essence, to be the quality of attention and/or intention that we bring to it. But what characterises the sort of attention / intention when it comes to work and play respectively? Well, we might consider this distinction in terms of the dichotomies we have observed elsewhere – extrinsic (or ‘instrumental’) motivation, in contrast to intrinsic motivation. In other words, if we want to get something out of the activity, seeing it as a means to an end, then it will tend to feel more like work, whereas if we are willing and able to abandon ourselves to the activity, and to experience and take pleasure in it for its own sake, it will tend to feel more like play. Indeed, for David Fleming, anything that is not instrumental is play:

Henri Lefebvre goes even further - “So deep is the fascination and so passionate the involvement of human beings in the various games they play that there must surely be a direct connection between playing games and life itself.”

It is perhaps as a result of having recognised this connection, that wisdom so often seems to come with a sense of humour (“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about”, observed Oscar Wilde). David Fleming’s writing, for instance – like the passage quoted above – is typically both deeply insightful and funny at the same time. More historically, we might think of the Socratic dialogues, or of the Mondo of the Zen Buddhist tradition (generally short, humorous parables in the form of dialogues):

A martial arts student went to his teacher and said earnestly, “I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it take me to master it?” The teacher’s reply was casual, “Ten years.” Impatiently, the student answered, “But I want to master it faster than that. I will work very hard. I will practice everyday, ten or more hours a day if I have to. How long will it take then?” The teacher thought for a moment, “20 years.”

What this tradition in particular understands is that it is futile to attempt to solve, through a straining sort of rationality, problems and perplexities that are a consequence of our over-reliance on straining and rationality. Like the student in the story – and indeed like this sentence – such attempts take us further away from, rather than bringing us nearer to, our object. Grubin elucidates (quite un-humorously, I might add) the importance of humour in this regard –

By ushering us into a world whose dynamics subverts reason and propriety, humour suggests that reason and propriety cannot be the sole arbiters of experience. People skilled in the art of laughter are by that token liberated from the provincialism of the single mind. Implicit in that liberation is freedom from the sanctimonious self, the earnest and defensive ego that is the by-product of prolonged participation in adult life.

Far too often, our ‘sanctimonious self’ blinds us to the errors, prejudices, and absurdities which are symptomatic of its sanctimonious-ness. Through humour and playfulness (among other things), Zen teaches us to let go of our self – or rather, to awaken to the nature of our self, in letting go of our ego and the rationality we use to defend it.

Thanks for reading! Do subscribe if you might like to read more of my writing. I send it thoughtfully and sparingly.