PLAY IN THE CITY

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Let us return to Huizinga and play, in its fundamentals. Huizinga
contributes this thought, as his first condition for the nature of play,
he declares:
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all play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play:
it could at best be but a forcible intimidation of it. By this quality
of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of natural
process. It is something added thereto and spread out over it like a
flowering, an ornament, a garment. 16
The non-coercible element of play, as Huizinga observes it, seems
to stand in direct conflict with our interpretation of Lefebvre’s
comment on the festival and its integrity to the order of the everyday.
With Huizinga’s logic, as soon as the festival is forced it ceases to be
a playful activity. We can enjoy Huizinga’s suggestion of play which
blooms like a flower or is worn like a garment. This reminds us also,
of the language, of Ian Borden and Walter Benjamin; these metaphors
highlight, again, play’s temporary nature. Where the analogy of colour
to canvas starts to fall down is it suggests a permanent change of state.
We can find further holes in the extension of this as flowers can be
wild or can be cultivated; the application of colour to canvas suggests
an author of the activity which, Huizinga points out, reduces play a
‘forcible intimidation’ of itself.
At this point we can turn the conversation to Mikhail Bakhtin; his
thinking on the carnival, and the layer of the official and non-official,
can further deepen our enquiry. Bakhtin’s indirectly points at the
nature of the carnival, or carnivalesque, through his thesis on François
Rabelais’ writing. Despite his subject, Rabelais, writing in the 16th
century about world of the medieval, it is suggested that Bakhtin is to
be “read as a hidden polemic against the regime’s [Soviet Russia under
Stalin] cultural politics”. 17
16. Huizinga, “Nature and Significance of Play”, p. 10.
17. Simon Denith, Bakhtinian thought: An introductory reader, (London, New York: Routledge,
1995). p.71
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