In his now classic study of play, “Men, Play, and Games”, Roger Caillois identified six characteristics that were historically and culturally associated with playful activity:

He notes however that these characteristics have not always been associated with play together and/or with the same degree of intensity and clarity throughout the history of Western philosophy and culture. He thus further elaborates the varying manifestations and permutations of these characteristics in /as play along a continuum occupied at each end by two terms, namely:

The history of the philosophical conceptions of play, especially in the Western imaginary has witnessed the systematic subordination of the paideic to the the ludic dimensions of play and it is proposed here that it is with reference to this broader philosophical and cultural rationalization of the play imperative that one can make sense of the historical disjunction of toys from the arts and other forms of ‘serious’ inquiry. The cultural trivialization of play as of all experiences, actors and objects associated with it is a concomitant of this larger subordination of the paideic to the ludic dimensions of play.  

It is noteworthy that pre-Socratic philosophy, especially in Heraclitus but also in Anaxagoras and Anacharsis treated play as fundamental to reality. For example, Heraclitus saw the natural world as an agonistic ceaseless play of forces caught in perpetual Becoming. The paideic notion of play is readily apparent in and fundamental to these philosophical frameworks. It is also noteworthy that there are significantly different interpretations of play found, most specifically, in Chinese and Indian philosophy that can be related to the discussions of ludus and paideia. For example, the most commonly used term for play in Sanskrit is kril or its derivative kridati which is used to denote the play of animals, children as well as of grown ups. Like in the Germanic languages this term also is related to the movements of wind and waves. This reference to free and spontaneous movement is partially useful in capturing the qualities of play suggested here. These are in contradistinction to other less often used terms such as divyati, which denotes gambling, throwing of dice and even jestful actions and khela more specifically referring to ‘sports’, both competitive and pleasure-oriented. The term, however, that has achieved serious philosophical consideration and explication is that of lila. Note that though this word more strictly refers to ‘divine’ play as in the playful actions of gods, it still retains some the spontaneity and free movement implied by ‘kridati’. For example, Coomaraswamy teases out the etymological association of ‘lila’ with the root ‘lih’ meaning ‘lick’ and to ‘lelay’ meaning ‘flicker’ and ‘flame’. Here the spontaneous lashings of the fire and its flickering tongues is confirmed effectively to capture some of qualities of ‘kril’ or ‘kridati’. The term lila has also come to mean ‘creative act’, and more specifically the creative act of God. In the third century B.C. text of Badarayama, the Vedanta Sutra, one sees a clear articulation of ‘lila’ as a theological term. Here the writer claims that the Supreme Lord creates the world ‘merely-in-play’ (lilakaivalyam) – where the world rather than being act of divine will and purpose comes into being by the playful and unintentional actions of God. The paideic resonances of the term lila and of play in Indian philosophy is similarly echoed in the Chinese term for play, wan.

It is interesting though that this early paideic emphasis on play in Western philosophy was later subordinated to and replaced by the principles of reason and knowledge in the works of Plato and Aristotle who saw play as essentially mimetic and therefore cognitively irrelevant and ethically problematic. It is in the background of this ‘ludic’ framework that favours the rational subordination of the volatility of play, that one needs to encounter the notions of play proposed by Immanuel Kant, that had an enduring effect on many subsequent philosophers, scientists and artists. In his “Critique of Pure Reason” Kant attempts at separating play and knowledge.  The task of the first critique is presented as one of replacing ‘mere play’ (blosses Spiel) of the imagination with ‘serious’ scientific investigations. Kant believed that the playfully imaginative deliberations of previous philosophies had delayed the consensus omnium (universal consensus) that he deemed necessary for making universally valid knowledge and ethical claims.  Kant rejected the agones logon of the Sophists in favour of principles of ‘orderliness’, ‘thoroughness’, ‘clear determination of concepts’ and ‘insistence upon strict proof’ - all of which he believed characterizes the serious philosophical framework that he was pioneering. 

It is interesting though that Kant also concludes somewhat oddly, that if the ‘thing in itself’ is essentially unknowable (noumenal) then cognition is only possible through an ‘as if’ mode; a mode not unlike that adopted in play. However, Kant, being the ‘serious’ philosopher he was, saw these cognitive insights derived from/in the ‘as if’ mode as needing the transcendental and rational operations of a subject to order them.  Thus, at least in the first critique, Kant's discussions of play is negative insofar as he conceived it to have negative consequences for man's rational and ethical being.  For play, in his first Critique, was still inherently non-cognitive and needed the ‘serious’ criticism and direction of Reason.

However, in the third Critique, Kant draws similarities between play and aesthetic judgment insofar as both shared qualities of “purposiveness without purpose” and were essentially “disinterested” with regards to the object of cognition.  Here play (like aesthetic judgment) is separated from knowledge -- since within its realm understanding and imagination function for their own sake rather than for a definite cognitive purpose. For Kant -- aesthetic judgment and play therefore lack cognitive value, and are relatively free from empirical constraints and reflect a delightful spontaneity.

It could be concluded that in his first and third critique, Kant considers play mainly in relation to cognition and despite judging it to be cognitively irrelevant he does believe that in its rational guise (that is under the direction of Reason) play could provide food for the imagination and understanding. Before concluding on Kant's discussion of play however, it is useful to quickly highlight his argument about play as presented in his 'Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View". There he opposes play to work. He argues, that play could compensate for the difficulties of work through providing a space where the constraints of work would have been set aside. However, he also warns that play could in its indulgence and sensual pleasures be a source of potential harm to man's social and rational being.  He does therefore conclude that unless checked and properly channeled by serious and rational concerns play would be a threat to man's ethical and rational life.

Another proponent of this 'ludic' framework of play is Friedrich Schiller, who responded essentially to the challenge posed by the Kantian conceptualization of play.  Schiller asserts bravely that: "Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being and he is only human being when he plays." Schiller believed that humans were driven by two dominant drives: the ‘sense – drive’ and the ‘form – drive’. The sense drive which proceeds from the physical existence of man (that is his sensual nature) requires that "there shall be change, that time shall have a content" and thus requires of man to subordinate to the forces of time and change. The sense drive was thus essentially one which reinforced man's finite phenomenal being. In contrast, the form drive proceeds from man’s rational nature and ‘is intent on giving him freedom to bring harmony into the diversity of his manifestations and to affirm his Reason among all his changes of condition”. It thus annuls (or at least seeks to annul) time and change. 

He believed that a third ‘play-drive’ served (and should serve) as a mediating mechanism between these two drives; providing a ‘happy medium’ between the physical exigencies of human existence and the human striving to transcend these exigencies. However, Schiller also conceives aesthetics as the orderly ‘as-if’ activity of the imagination under the direct guidance of Reason. In this sense he still remains very much within the Kantian and therefore ‘ludic’ framework. 

It is in the works of Nietzsche that one finds the most concerted effort to articulate play as a philosophical stance contrary to those enacted by Kant. In this sense, the ‘Nietzschean turn’ in Western philosophy is very much a turn to paideia; towards a way of thinking that sought to free play and thought from the subordinating and negative influences of Reason. In a famous comment on Heraclitus’ fragments Nietzsche writes:

Nietzsche’s notion of play strongly validates the world of games, imagination and Becoming over that of Reason, understanding and Being.  Unlike Kant, he sees play as cosmic rather than as human disinterestedness, that is ‘beyond all rationality and ethics’. In some ways Nietzsche renovates the pre-Socratic notion of play that held some of its ‘paideic’ qualities of being ‘pre-rational’ and ‘a-rational’.  His view of play in addition to being a reworking of Heraclitus’ is also tied to Anaxagoras’ notion of nous as the random cosmic creative force. "Nous", Nietzsche echoes Anaxagoras, "has no duty and hence no purpose or goal which it would be forced to pursue".  He reasserts, "Absolute free will can only be imagined as purposeless like a child's game or an artists’ creative play impulse".  In his “Birth of Tragedy” Nietzsche examines tragedy as a creative tension between what he calls the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses of creation. He argues that the Apollonian impulse is characterised by the principium individuationis (the principal of individuation) where the will to order, symmetry and beauty operate in manners determined by a subject. The Dionysian impulse however is posed as one of rupture where the individual forgets himself (as if intoxicated by it) and by this becomes at one with other individuals and the world.

In the Dionysian state, the notions of artist - author actively creating - shaping and giving form - as would be operational in the Apollonian state is actively subverted.  The artist becomes himself/herself a work of art - shaped and given form if at all by the productive power, so to speak, of the entire universe.  In Nietzsche, play and will to power - remain indefinable, though being partially describable in terms of each other; that is, play is a manifestation of power just as power is a manifestation of play. It is no surprise thus that Nietzsche saw the role of the “subject” (which he actively critiqued) or the artist as subject purposively molding the world / art object as increasingly problematic. He, in fact, envisages a world in which art creates itself, where the artist is merely incidental not integral to its becoming or its coming into being. In his “Will to Power” he enigmatically poses: “The work of art where it appears without an artist eg. as body, as organisation…. To what extent the artist is only a preliminary stage.  The world as work of art that gives birth to itself.” Here, in an interesting preemption of Foucault’s notion of the author function and Barthes’ ‘death of the author’, the artist/creator becomes superfluous in the creative process. Not the ‘origin’ and therefore ultimate ground for the critical assessment of the art object but rather a discursive operation and/or yet another strategic position in the creative process.

While there are several major thinkers whose thoughts have affected the contemporary ‘paedeic’ framing of play, (for example, Heidegger, Fink, Rahner, Gadamer) it is useful to examine the ideas of Deleuze and Derrida insofar as they seem to have contributed most to the development of the notion of paideic play.  Deleuze’s critical developments have been for many a direct (or indirect) consequence of his engagement with Nietzsche’s notion of ‘will to power’. In fact, Deleuze’s reading of ‘will to power’, as presented in his “Nietzsche and Philosophy” had been crucial in formulating the parameters of Nietzsche scholarship in France. Nietzsche’s ‘will to power, for Deleuze, provided a notion of reality as an active interplay of physical forces rather than as one tied to some transcendentalist, voluntaristic or subjectivist principles, all of which had become difficult to articulate with the Nietzschean ‘problematization of the subject’. 

In his interpretation of Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘tragic’, Deleuze distinguishes two variants of the prerational concept of play, namely a) play as innocent, exuberant and excessive manifestation of power; and b) play as risk-taking or as chance-necessity. Deleuze relates his concept of play to his other concepts of being as becoming, unity as multiplicity and repetition as difference. He states that the “relationship between being and becoming, between the one and the many can be understood in terms of a game played by an artist, a child and a god - three embodiments of Dionysus.” For him the two moments of the Dionysian game that is the affirming of becoming and the affirming of the being of becoming can be seen via what he identifies as two moments of a “dice throw”: (a) the rolling of the dice  - that which affirms that risk-taking that becoming necessarily implies; (b) the coming to rest of the dice which affirms that state, whatever its nature, that one’s becoming opens up. For Deleuze as for Nietzsche, there can be such things as ‘bad players’ in this game. He elaborates: “To abolish chance by holding it in the grip of causality and finality, to count on the repetition of throw rather than affirming chance, to anticipate a result instead of affirming necessity – these are all operations of a bad player.” For Deleuze then affirmation is not one that is opposed to negation: “Affirmation is the enjoyment and play of its own difference” – it is not a hedging of one’s bets with a calculation of one’s chances but a giving over to the game play.   
It is impossible to elaborate Derrida’s notion of play as explicated in his work as there are substantively little discussions of play as such though in terms of the critical attitude of deconstruction one cannot help but note that Derrida’s notion of play is performed in/by his works than explicated in it. However, some of his main arguments on play seem apparent in his essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the “Discourse of the Human Science”. It is here that Derrida introduces his concept of ‘free play’. Derrida argues that the notion of structure and sign presuppose the existence of a ‘center, a point of presence, a fixed origin’ where this center would ‘orient, balance and organize the structure’, that is, ‘the play of the structure’. In a deconstructive gesture from within Derrida sought to, in relation to this centered, limiting and grounded ‘play’, introduce another kind of play which is ‘affirmative’: one that celebrates and joyfully affirms ‘the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming’.

This affirmation introduces indeterminacy into a structure that sought to patrol its operations and implies a radical rethinking not only of art making but also of interpretation. Unlike the earlier kind of interpretation which ‘seeks to decipher, dream of deciphering, truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign’, the one that affirms play goes ‘beyond Man and humanism, the name of Man being that being who, … throughout his history …has dreamed of full presence, the reasoning foundation, the origin and the end of play.” Derrida through this essay highlights two kinds of play: the play of a centered and limited structure, in which the signifiers are strictly regulated and controlled by a transcendental signified and / or subject. And the play of a decentered limitless structure in which signifiers become emancipated and obey no rule – they are governed, if at all, only by chance. Derrida in a gesture typical of him insists on not choosing between these two kinds of play – preferring instead “to trace their differentiated play of difference”. Derrida’s privileging of ‘critical indeterminacy’ and ‘perpetual vigilance’ are in a sense gestures that ‘keep one in play’. 

Toys are the concretization of the play imperative – they present in objective forms the invitation and facilitation to play and it is perhaps because of the historical subordination of the paideic that play has become relegated to the realm of the child and the trivial. This infantilization of play has also led to the exclusion of toys from the realms of serious contemplation and aesthetic reflection characterizing art insofar as notions of childhood developed in ways that excluded these experiences. The cultural overemphasis on the seriousness of art and the frivolity of toys has made them occupy mutually exclusive realms even though the fact that historically toys were carefully crafted objects worthy of being called objet d’art and considered ‘artistic’ indicates a long and complex relationship between art and toys. The industrialization and mass production of toys in the late 19th century and the niche consumerization of toys almost exclusively to children in the post-World War II years have further distanced the realms of art and toys. The cultural association of toys with childhood, consumerism and trivial pursuits has more or less ensured that the arts, so focused on serious issues, do not toy around with them except if there were some deeper and more serious point to be made. The fact that toys themselves represent a serious realm of human activity involved in the generation and circulation of cultural notions like identity, gender, sexuality, work, leisure, violence, domesticity and pleasure is very often obscured by this cultural trivialization of toys. One could even say that the twin stories of toys and art have by a strange tension developed parallel but related fortunes. While toys have been submitted to systematic trivialization, the arts, especially as a backlash to the wild autonomy of the modernist artist, have been blackmailed into greater levels of artistic sobriety. 

The use of toys in contemporary art seems to have had its earliest expressions in pop art where images and materials of toys were appropriated as emblems of popular culture. In more recent times, there has been a greater confluence of art and popular culture insofar as artists do not pretend to stand outside and above popular culture as its critical voice (eye?) but rather see the need to produce immanent critique from within the beast of pop culture. This has led to artists not only employing the images, materials and modalities of toys but also actually creating toys per se.  The cultural associations of toys with ‘fun’ and ‘entertainment’ that were previously the very basis for artists to avoid them have become now the very rationale for artists to work with toys. Contemporary art may have made a dramatic shift towards fun and entertainment, appropriating the logic and modalities of toys as part of this shift. Given the cultural proliferation and popularization of more services and products focused on attending to people’s desire for fun and entertainment, it could be argued that contemporary art would be doomed to further marginalization if it does not at least respond to them. Hence, the use of toys or the very making of toy-like art works may well be a mimetic response to the challenge of the products and services of the fun and entertainment industries. The question for some though is how far this mimetic response constitutes a critical gesture.  A more difficult task though is to deliberate how art has up to now failed to respond to the phenomenological experience called ‘fun’ and if toys (not toys as art) are not an appropriate response.

NOTES

1. This essay was published as a curatorial framing of an exhibition, ‘Toys’, that explored the notion of toys and play in contemporary art that the writer curated in Singapore in 2004.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gunalan Nadarajan, Gunalan Nadarajan is an art theorist / curator from Singapore and is currently Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, College of Arts and Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University (USA). His publications include a book, Ambulations (2000), numerous catalogue essays and various academic articles including most recently, “Ornamental Biotechnology and Parergonal Aesthetics”, in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (MIT Press; 2006) and “Islamic Automation: A Reading of al-Jazari’s ‘Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices’ (1206)”, in Media Art Histories (MIT Press; 2006). He has curated exhibitions in several countries including Ambulations (Singapore), 180KG (Jogjakarta, Indonesia), Negotiating Spaces (Auckland, New Zealand) and media_city 2002 (Seoul, S.Korea). He was contributing curator for Documenta XI (Kassel, Germany) and served on the jury of several international exhibitions including ISEA2004 (Helsinki / Talinn) and transmediale 05 (Berlin, Germany).