PLAY IN THE CITY
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Through Bakhtin’s exploration of Rabelais, we can begin to view the
carnival as an antiauthoritarian act of collective play:
Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth
and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all
hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions… All were
considered equal during the carnival … The utopian ideal of the
realistic merged in the carnival experience, unique of its kind. 18
If we look back to Huizinga’s conditions of play – a bubble of space and
time in which new order can exist – we see the parallels to Bakhtin’s
observations of the carnival; a space in time, within which the accepted
social systems and hierarchies, are cast aside. Carnival becomes a
platform within which the playing field of life is flattened. Its inherent
playfulness further exaggerated in its temporality, in which it is simple
a “suspension” of normal rules as opposed to a re-writing of them.
The critical aspect of Bakhtin’s inquiry appears as the appearance of the
carnival as a controlled explosion of normal order, within a proscribed
window of time. This situation is referred to as ‘carnival disorder’ and
has been argued to work as a licensed safety-valve for social disruption,
allowing the preservation of authority. 19 In his introduction to
Bakhtin’s writing, Simon Denith draws a parallel between Bakhtin’s
ideas to the thinking of Lunacharvsky, who wrote about laughter as a
controlled devise of relieving social tension. 20 This situation is apparent
when we consider the designation of festivals and holidays within the
annual calendar. In the UK today, we collectively acknowledge the
‘bank holiday’ as a break to the ordinary order of things; the ruling
order is this could be acknowledged as the bank and the market.
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18. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Rebelais and His World, 1965 (extracts translated H Iswolsky, Indiana
University Press, 1984)” in Pam Morris, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medveedev,
Voloshinov, (Newyork: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 199.
19. Pam Morris, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medveedev, Voloshinov, (New York:
Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 22.
20. Denith, Bakhtinian Thought: An introductory Reader, p. 71.
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