[Xmca-l] Re: Do adults play?

[vwilk]

Not so very long ago,  October 13 in fact, Douglas Williams in answer to 
Caitlin's request turned his hand to a Socratic dialogue, and Phillip 
White followed up the same day by recalling Bateson's metalogue, "Why do 
Frenchmen."  I myself have been working on a General Systems Theory 
approach to allegoresis and hermeneutics -- they said it can't be done!  
So, just like the guy who built "Swamp Castle" in Monty Python and the 
Holy Grail, I just have to do it to show it can be done!  In this 
discussion, there is a problem in the narrowness of the focus on what 
can be seen in the pre-verbal activities of one year olds.

The discussion must be given a framework to make sense.  We have to 
define the context in general as we home in on the "specific strip" that 
is to be our focus.  Well, framing turns out to be quite a big deal 
because we have to say "framings", realizing that there is going to be a 
large amount of overlap, and some things will not become coherent until 
they are viewed through multiple frames.  Gregory Bateson spoke of 
multiple versions of the world and multiple versions of relationship. 
Quite incidently, I recently saw a youtube of Allan G. Hunter discussing 
"Brothers Grim vs. Disney: Recovering the Wisdom Lost to Commercialism. 
Greg Thompson mentions Bakhtin's work with Rabelais, but we can go back 
to Golden Ass of Apuleius, Boccaccio, and Chaucer and  for story games 
and not leave out mimicking, parody, satire, and other forms of 
representation.  I put "specific strip" in quotations because I am 
invoking Goffman's Frame Analysis, the introduction to  which in all 
deep scholarly seriousness is a hilarious tour de force on parenthetic 
reasoning.

Fairy Tales and Fantasy are as much  for adults, or more so, as 
children, and all human behavior, if it can be observed and described, 
can then be discussed, and who is doing the discussing?  A linguist, a 
psychologist, a philosopher, an economist, and a physicist? We could go 
to Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism to set up a provisional frame 
work, then give John Dewey a chance to frame the situation.  New 
information would appear in the moire pattern. You would need abduction 
to borrow the knowledge of observed processes from one context for use 
in another, and yet this works.  We can take Caillois' Les Jeux et Les 
Hommes (1952) as a starting point, although, as Phillip White pointed 
out Huizinga stepped in earlier with "homo ludens" (1938).  Then, of 
course, everything about Games with players comes in with von Neumann's 
Theory of Games and Economic behavior.  You see, as a General Systems 
Theorist, I see that the theories bound together by correspondences and 
interconnections require that a discussion begin with start point, for 
example, a provisional definition of the system, a sketching in, knowing 
that the mapping would be revised communally, though "the final 
(provisional!) report" would have the name of the researcher/s. 
Nonetheless, the system will be in a context and have subsystems and 
immediate, proximate, and global contexts.  Moreover, we had better 
define the "system" and clarify the nature of the "strip" which we are 
discussing, and then see what wealth of insight is produced by a 
refining procedure and perhaps a collection of keywords.   These terms I 
use, "strip" "keyword" "moire pattern" are a collection of random "tools".

I'm sure we have gotten closer already to a discussion of play in 
adulthood than indicated by Greg.  We have wider scope of vision, 
learning, and experience among ourselves than indicated by this plea for 
"leads on the role of play in adulthood"  ...  an anthropological and 
educational framing WITH wide general reading might help us establish a 
clearer sense of where we have gotten to and where we are going.



(2013/10/21 12:22), Greg Thompson wrote:
> If so, what does it look like?
>
> I looked back at the suggestions sent to Caitlin Wubbena who had asked
> about the role of play in places like academia. It seemed like very few of
> the responses spoke to play in adulthood and fewer spoke to play in
> academia.
>
> So I'm wondering is the problem here that CHAT theorists are only
> interested in "play" as a thing that gets the child into a more expansive
> world (cf. Beth's concurrent thread on play among 1 year-olds)? Or is there
> a literature on "play" across the lifespan? And to my opening question:
> what would "play" look like in adolescence or adulthood?
>
> So, does anyone have any good leads on the role of play in adulthood?
>
> Seems like Bakhtin's work on Rabelais might be a start? But I don't know
> enough about his work to know if Bakhtin was using the concept of "play."
> (and other great satirists come to mind as well - Laurence Sterne's
> Tristram Shandy seems a nice early example of "play" in writing that goes
> beyond mere "comedy" and into a really complex form of "play", but there
> must be earlier examples of this type of play).
>
> Any ideas?
> -greg
>
>