PLAY IN THE CITY

00. ESSAY
THE STREET PARTY
THINKING THROUGH A DEPICTION OF
PLAY IN THE CITY
Baudelaire’s love at last sight depicts the potential of the crowd to present
a fragment of excitement, a glimmer of otherness. Lowry’s street party
scene can be seen to show a washing of the whole crowd in a collective
activity; it shows an event distinctly other to the ordinary proceeding of
things and, as we have considered, a playful use of city space. Huizinga
points to play as the notable deviation from the ordinary as he states,
“We find play present everywhere as a well-defined quality of action
which is different from ‘ordinary’ life.’ 10 However, as depicted in this
image, the scale of play has been dramatically expanded. A proliferation
of playful activity over-writes the normal order, within the city, and
now encompasses all corners of the frame.
At this point we can turn to the English language and interrogate
how we describe the event we seen in our critical object, an activity
of collective play. The word ‘Party’, our point departure, has myriad
readings; it describes a part of a whole, as well as a side in a battle,
or the oppositional configuration of government within in UK. Its
use is, in the social sense, not listed until the 13th use in the English
language in the Oxford English Dictionary. 11 Through its readings we
see evidence that the party can be a divisive term in language. The
word itself suggests that the activity of the party is not for everyone –
there is either a guest-list or a metaphysical limit to participation – at
some point a line is drawn.
We see further evidence of this in considering ‘street’ as a prefix to ‘party’.
The physical manifestation of street creates a divisive spatial threshold,
which is, as we have thought through previously, transgressed through
the act of play. We understand that ‘the streets’ serve anyone as a piece
of crucial shared city infrastructure, but ‘a street’ is associated to a
localised sense of ownership.
_
10. Huizinga, “Nature and Significance of Play”, p. 4.
11. “party, n.”. OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/
Entry/138347?rskey=cQqvYC&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed March 30, 2018).
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