I went to bed over an hour ago. I have been lying awake thinking about this:
We all take ourselves way too fucking seriously.*
Where is there room for play in the academy?
And who will help me find it, and nourish it?
*With the exception of squadratomagico, who is my hero in this regard. I nominate her to lead the Vanguard of Play.
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March 30, 2008 at 1:54 am
renaissance girl
Isn’t that what teaching is for? Seriously. I have so much fun with my students, and with the dynamics of our shared enthusiasms, that I can’t believe I get paid for it.
March 30, 2008 at 10:53 am
Hannah
Well, my seminars are fun. We make jokes about Irish heathens and medieval hagiography. Other than that I have a deep desire to set up a dance flashmob in the library. If only because I spend my life walking through it and sitting in it wanting to dance to whatever is playing on my iPod. There are spaces in the Brotherton that would be perfect.
March 30, 2008 at 12:03 pm
neophyte
RG — good call. That occurred to me. Unfortunately, only the best of classrooms are truly playful. If that’s the space you’ve created — and I trust you to have done — I applaud you. However, enjoying something, being enthusiastic about it, or having “fun,” is not the same as play. I don’t mean “play” in any intensely philosophical sense (in other words, I am not Johan Huizinga). I suppose I mean creative, collective activity focused not on attaining a specific goal (understanding a text; making an argument; debating a problem) but rather on exploration, experimentation, and fun. My friend the Foucauldian Bombshell and I used to spend hours talking up invented histories of Britain, amalgams of “real” history, the wackiest among Renaissance tropes, faerie lore, and queer theory. Not the sort of thing you’d ever write down, but they were fun, and thoughtful, and expanded our creative capacities and the way we thought about early Britain. We would never have dared have those conversations in front of our professors. They weren’t “serious” enough. To that, I say, “What the hell?”
I can’t wait to teach. And I don’t get to, not for a while yet. In the interim, I have to find ways to make thesising, then another year of seminars, playful. How?
Hannah — With you on the dance flashmob. Used to stage dance parties in the thesis carrels on the fourth floor of my undergrad library — 10:30 p.m. on a Monday, everyone busily busily working, and then I or a comrade would blast the place with Patti Smith and we’d all emerge and dance for ten minutes, much to the chagrin of the more tight-assed thesis-writers. Want to know who won all the departmental prizes? Us, the dancers. Not the tight-asses. I think there’s a lesson in this.
March 30, 2008 at 5:21 pm
squadratomagico
/smile/… I remember a lot of specifically academic play back at the Petri Dish (from which, as you know, I also graduated). I recall a class on Dante where we were required to submit a “creative” project inspired by the Divine Comedy as our final assignment. I made a weaving. A Religion class required us to compose our own theology: I submitted a loaf of home-baked bread, with commentary. (As you may be able to tell, this was back in my organic, earth mother phase). I got As on both assignments, too. I occasionally give creative assignments here at OPU, but it’s harder to do so with large lecture classes being the main format.
Play became a lot harder in grad. school, and in my pre-tenure years. The life you read about in my blog is only a couple of years old, and I think of it, in some ways, as getting the chance to party that I never experienced in my 20s and 30s, when I worked 60 hours a week or more. Things feel so much more balanced now: I’ve carved out the niche I wanted in the academic world, and now I can maintain that on 30-40 hours per week and supplement it with other things. In fact, one reason I configured my blog as I did was precisely in order to provide a model of an academic for whom academia is not an all-encompassing identity, but only part of the whole.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any short cuts to this place — I think I only could be this playful after a lot of work.
March 30, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Horace
Learning to play isn’t easy, or perhaps, not forgetting how to play isn’t easy. Teaching is one good place, but even conferences (except for the perpetually enviable Kalamazoo Medieval conference) have gotten deadly serious.
My guess is that academic play was killed the day jouissance became jargon.
Other suggestions for play? Department talent night. chair races in the halls, office hour sherry tastings, student prizes for best faculty impersonation…what else goes on this list?
March 31, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Nabil
I sympathize with squadratomagico’s perspective – I imagine that real play would require a space outside of, in contrast to, work.
I think this may be a particularly American problem. America is almost unique among advanced capitalist nations to have no mandatory vacation, no mandatory pregnancy leave, and no mandatory sick days. Work is basically life. In itself, that seems like kind of a problem. I think I’m getting this from Ehrenreich, but in the “past” (I forget when and where, exactly) the calendar was saturated with festivals and holidays.
I know that, on the other hand, in Pakistan, people typically get out of work at 3. Sure, as a result our economy isn’t as awesome as yours, but people spend time with their families, visiting, socializing, etc. I guess we pay for that now by living at the whim of your military, but working a lot wouldnt make up the difference at this point any way, so why not let the good times roll?
My concern now is: putting together what squadratomagico and horace said, how can i work 60 hours a week or more throughout my 20s and 30s – you know, what’s left of my “youth” I guess – without forgetting how to play?
April 1, 2008 at 12:09 am
squadratomagico
One further point: I can play in my circus because I don’t have children. If I had that time commitment, the circus would be impossible. On the other hand, I have colleagues with kids who say that having children is the best inducement to play they can imagine — their children inspire them.
While I see that point, I also am a little saddened by the idea that play is so definitively regarded as “belonging ” to children, that adults have to re-learn play techniques from them. How impoverishing! Imagination, creativity, pretending: in adulthood, all these things become the province either of “professional” artists and performers, who are given cultural license to create; or else are lost to adults entirely. We need a culture that recognizes these activities as nourishing and restorative, even if conducted for the sheer fun of it, rather than to display perfection and expertise.
April 1, 2008 at 1:33 am
renaissance girl
Sq: Funny, I was considering leaving a comment here about how I’m able to get so much of my desire for play satisfied by my kids. I can’t run away and join the circus, but I’ve produced one of my own. I wouldn’t say, exactly, that play belongs to them, but that when I’m with them I devote myself to a process aesthetic, if you will. And–not coincidentally, I think–I always do more creative and interesting intellectual work after a day of play than when I shackle myself to a desk all day.
April 1, 2008 at 7:13 pm
neophyte
What a lovely discussion to come home to at the end of a very unplayful day.
Squadrato — that, in large part, was my experience of the Petri Dish as well, though the “play” often happened more on the steps of the library at eleven p.m. than it did in classrooms or during writing time. Constant creativity, in all possible directions. Even when I wasn’t a participant, I always loved observing. I want that back. What you and Nabil say about balancing “work” and “play” is exactly what distresses me, though — I want to find ways to knit the two more closely together.
Horace — My guess is that academic play was killed the day jouissance became jargon. Good god. Well put. But don’t you think departmental talent night might cause… uh, injuries, at best? And yes. Most of the reason I want to do some late-medieval work has to do with curiosity about and jealousy of K’zoo.
Nabil — “we” and “you”? Really? And isn’t it cultivating greater love for work — not the life of a grind, but real love — rather than guaranteeing slackitude, that might foster play within the boundaries of work?
And I am totally unqualified to speak on the subject of children. At all.
All this said, however, after a day of writing — however bland the actual product (and believe me, sucka is bland), I am feeling some kind of refreshed newness. Seriousness has its merits. I even credit it with clearing my sinuses.
April 2, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Nabil
Haha – I did it in the spirit of play. Actually, who to identify with is a very complicated question, and I can’t do it justice here. I’ll have to try sometime soon though, on my own blog.
Well, believe me, I’m as attracted by the ideal of unalienated labor as you are. Unfortunately, that ideal is at odds with the spirit of the age, which is constantly pressing for differentiation.
My worry is that, at least for the majority of people, following out the ideal of loving work will become a matter of “love what you’ve got” as opposed to find something you love. And on top of that, I’m a little frightened by the idea that I should love my work, because if love is absorbed into work, this would probably mean a constant, undifferentiated state of work. You know, Google style. But instead of being the product of my spontaneous will, this state will probably require an adaptation to – and complete identification with – the economic system.
That’s the interesting thing. At least in this country, we’re shifting to this economy where not many people really have to do manual labor. This is when Marx thought all work would become a kind of play. But is that really what we have now?
On the other hand, maybe it’s just that I can’t imagine what play would look like where I work. I think that you – and other academics – are about as close to realizing the ideal as anyone is nowadays. If people around you aren’t taking advantage of that possibility, then I can only ask – wtf? Or, maybe the exigencies of the market are penetrating further into the groves of academe.
January 26, 2009 at 1:16 pm
squadratomagico » Blog Archive » recognized for playfulness!
[...] In the fourteen months or so that I’ve been blogging, I’ve received various tokens of recognition from other bloggers: The Thinking Blogger award, the Rockin’ Girl Blogger award, the E is for Excellent rating. These are wonderful little cyber gifts, and I appreciate them immensely. But nothing has meant quite so much to me as these two blog entries, both posted over the past month. The first is from Mouse, at Notes of a Neophyte: [...]