The Philosophy of Play Edited by Emily Ryall, Wendy Russell and Malcolm MacLean First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 selection and editorial material, Emily Ryall, Wendy Russell and Malcolm MacLean; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The philosophy of play / edited by Emily Ryall, Wendy Russell and Malcolm MacLean. pages cm. 1. Play (Philosophy) 2. Play–Social aspects. I. Ryall, Emily. B105.P54P55 2013 128–dc23 2012043800 ISBN: 978-0-415-53835-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-10942-7 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear 11 Playing in a Deleuzian playground Stuart Lester The aim of this chapter is to bring a Deleuzian gaze to play, and by doing so unsettle dominant accounts of this form of behaviour. It will set to work some key concepts from Deleuzian philosophy to reveal play as an affirmation of crea- tivity, opening ‘ourselves to the experimentation that the future offers rather than clinging to the illusory identity that the present places before us’ (May 2005: 68). Playing from this perspective reminds us that the future is not given, but always contains the potential for novelty and the unexpected. It asks ‘what if ’ the world is thought, felt and acted on differently and by doing so brings about different becomings, new trajectories, new responses, unheard- of futures (Massumi 1992). The discussion opens by bringing Deleuzian concepts into play, proceeds to situate them in an experimental space of Jack and the Beanstalk before moving into the Deleuzian playground itself. But it should be made clear at the outset that this is not a definitive reading, or an act of precision. Many have com- mented on the nonsense and impenetrability of Gilles Deleuze’s writings; his thoughts are among the most esoteric and even obscure of recent thinkers (May 2005), producing an eclectic fusion of ‘misbehaving concepts’ (McGowan 2007). For anyone who is accustomed to conventional ways of writing and lan- guage use, reading the work of Deleuze, and his collaborations with Felix Guat- tari, can be confusing, unsettling and infuriating. An extreme viewpoint from Wheen (2004) refers to Deleuze’s writings as gibberish which in itself presents a significant lure to someone who has spent much of their life studying and working with play. There are many existing objections to Deleuzian concepts, and this piece will no doubt give rise to further questions. So be it: the task at hand here is not about veracity but rather an attempt to elucidate how certain refrains make pos- sible a different and difference reading of play. The appeal of Deleuzian philo- sophy lies with its capability to be ‘used in many different ways and in direct relation to practices and events in everyday life’ (Olsson 2009: 24–25).The question from a Deleuzian standpoint is not ‘what does it mean’ but ‘how does it work’? Deleuze was prolific in designing and involving his philosophy and used phi- losophers, scientists, artists, musicians and writers as resource kits for his own Playing in a Deleuzian playground 131 musings (Buchanan 2000) to produce a political philosophy concerned with the complex and ever- changing practicalities of the everyday that reveal it to be anything but everyday. The collection of single and co- produced work invites the reader into a space that lies beneath habitual ways of seeing the world, and by doing so reveals a realm of ever-present virtualities, the not yet known, waiting to be released. Above all it is a philosophy of movement and experimentation. The main force of the argument presented here is that children’s play marks a time/space in which ever- present virtualities are actualised, producing moments in which children are becoming- different; that is, following their own desires rather than following adult determined pathways. But it is perhaps more than this; thinking differently about play inevitably disturbs the foundations upon which dominant understandings of the nature of children’s play, and by inference childhood and adulthood, are constructed and reveals a different way of attuning to and caring for multiple and lively ways of being together. Deleuzian philosophy Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 2) consider philosophy to be ‘the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts’. But as they elaborate, forming, inventing or fabricating concepts doesn’t quite fit: concepts are not forms, discoveries or products, but more rigorously are created; a concept is something that is always new. Concepts are not waiting to be discovered, already formed, but are always in the process of creating themselves. Concepts are not valued for revealing ‘truths’, but for what they can do and the affect they create – it is a matter of production rather than reflection (Zayani 2000). For Deleuze and Guattari the history and task of classical philosophy has been to form stable sites for thinking, where thought is subject to logic systems and rational analysis. It manifests and maintains itself through resemblance, analogy, identity and opposition. But theirs is a philosophy that is nomadic, constantly and restlessly wandering, encountering other concepts to assemble novel connections. The process of producing concepts brings about an act of deterritorialisation, injecting disturbance into the system of orthodox thought and habits of mind. Just as with children’s play, the creation of concepts is an opportunity to invent, create and experiment. Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 33) explain that the philosophical purpose is to ‘extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give them a new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events’. The actualisa- tion of different conceptual possibilities produces an approach to life itself that is affirmative and constantly disturbing; who knows what concepts are yet to be formed and what universes await discovery? This starts to explain the intellectu- ally mobile concepts which lead into new landscapes littered with the stuff of geophilosophy. Whatever its nomadic wanderings, playful inversion of language and rework- ing of ideas, there is a central point that poses the question ‘How might one 132 S. Lester live’ (May 2005)? At the heart of Deleuze (and Guattari) lies an exploration of the possibilities of human relations, a challenge to worn- out binary relationships between individual and society, freedom and control, and so on. But it is not a complete revolution or overthrow of what exists; to do so would lead to despair and paralysis (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Rather, the mobile concepts enable a reworking of power, interrupt common-sense and escape the constraints of order to discover new ideas and movements. Where does one begin? As intimated in the introduction, this is not an attempt to present, interpret or produce an authoritative reading of Deleuze’s philosophy. Neither does it seek to explain play by a simple application of Deleuzian concepts. Rather it releases these into action; it is an intuitive response or a creative process that emerges by negating the old and resisting the temptation to understand the new by using old concepts (Grosz 2005). It necessitates affirming odd connections to create new affects. The approach is ‘playful’ through injecting disturbance into habits of thought and common sense to produce new and (potentially?) exciting possibilities. It thrives on the belief that the world is indeterminate and con- tains far more than can be ever accounted for, which suggests that meanings are always open to further inventions, experimentations and possibilities. Deleuze dares us to think differently by using conceptual tools that unsettle and penetrate a universal and dominant way of seeing and explaining the world. It carries a critique of ‘state philosophy’ for its tree- like, or arborescent, produc- tion of thought in which everything can be traced back to a single point of origin (the fixed root of thought). While the root may divide, everything is derived and situated in a hierarchical relationship to the main root, or ‘deeply rooted’ (Markula 2006). It relies on binary logic of dichotomy which makes it impossible to consider multiplicity. It has come to mould and dominate our ways of thinking (Zayani 2000). Countering this, Deleuze and Guattari (1988) introduce the concept of rhizomatic thought as a network or decentred multiplic- ity; there is no central point which holds things together (Bonta and Protevi 2004). A rhizome is marked by connectivity and heterogeneity; it ‘has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions which cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 9). It may be broken, but it will start up again on one of its old lines or start a new line.