What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? (thebaffler.com)
Sharing an article about play that I really enjoyed, although its a bit of a departure from some of the material in class. Graeber wrote this piece on animal play back in 2014, where he asks us to reconsider some fundamental assumptions about biology – like what motivates play in living creatures, and whether that play could simply be end in and of itself. I appreciate how he describes science’s obsession with explaining reality in rational and objective terms, when play can be both fundamental to the human experience and irrational in it’s motivation. There are some definite parallels to our class, although he deviates quite a bit and references figures like Darwin and Kropotkin in lieu of ludic specialists like Huizinga and Bogost.
The article also meanders into chemistry, physics, and metaphysics and asks if play could exist at the most fundamental levels of material reality. Some portions I didn’t find super convincing, but overall it’s a sprawling read that definitely got me thinking about the various scientific and material assumptions underlying our understanding of play.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
My friend June Thunderstorm and I once spent a half an hour sitting in a meadow by a mountain lake, watching an inchworm dangle from the top of a stalk of grass, twist about in every possible…
Thanks very much for sharing! This is fascinating and, I think, at the intersection of two wavelets in humanisitic reserarch a) Kropotkin and traditions of “mutual aid”; and b) all things animals, including the question of animal play. There’s definitely a final research project here for anyone who’s interested: Bruce Sutton-Smith’s book was engaging the question of animal play in the 1990s, and we’ll read some of his work in the coming weeks (though not the part on animals).