Mathias Poulsen

Play Activist & Researcher @ Designskolen Kolding

Cultivating a Playful Critique

I think through the writing, and, like Laurel Richardson, ‘I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it’ (2001). Writing, for me, is an inquiry, an ongoing process of exploration and experimentation. It is personal, vulnerable, full of doubt and insecurity, it is not a matter of asserting what I know but trying to find words for what I don’t understand. I feel encouraged by Judith Butler’s claim that ‘liberty emerges at the limits of what one can know’ (2001), but working and living ‘at the edge of incomptence’ (2005, as Elliot Eisner called it, is both a terrifying and invigorating place to be.

Terrifying, not least, in the face of the numerous rejections one must weather as an academic. Surely, among the many reasons why I like being in academia, and why I hope to stay there for a while, the continuous flow of rejections is not one such reason. One always submits any kind of writing with the awareness that it might not be accepted. Sometimes rejections are accompanied by supportive words, just as often no relevant feedback is received. I suspect that the odds of rejection are probably greater the less one feels comfortable adhering to established standards and conventions. In any case, the feeling is never exactly joyful. I’m not sure we talk enough about the mental strain of so regularly being rejected.

Anyway, while rejections can be entirely reasonable, the ideas that sparked the writing can live on, mature, change, grow, and who knows, maybe get published in time.

Here, I share an abstract where I try to develop a form of ‘playful critique’ as an attempt at finding a voice and a form of critique that is more affirmative, caring and loving. While it was recently rejected by a journal, I haven’t given up on it quite yet and would love to hear your thoughts. As always, if writing sparks meaningful conversations, it is already worthwhile.


Introduction

What might a playful critique look and feel like? What might it allow or even demand me – and us – to become? Like a trickster, teasing me, mocking my persistent inability to respond, the question is haunting me, daring me to write this paper.

And so I must try.

While I hope the paper may lead to conversations of a ‘supra-disciplinary’ (Braidotti, 2019a) nature, it unfolds specifically in the context of play design (Gudiksen & Skovbjerg, 2020). It is borne of the recurring issue, where we, researchers and students alike, end up with a critique that ‘hands down sentences’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 323), critique that merely engages in ‘fault-finding’ and ‘negative judgment’ (Williams, 1976/1983, p. 83). Oh, those dreadful ‘habits of snapping at the world as if the whole point of being and thinking is just to catch it in a lie’ (Stewart, 2017, p. 196). We cannot look ahead with a critique that only looks back, we cannot build worlds with a critique that insists on tearing them down. As Latour asked, ‘is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins?’ (Latour, 2004, p. 225).

Hoping to find a way out of this rut, I write the paper as an inquiry (Gibbs, 2015; Richardson, 2001), asking once more: what might a playful critique look and feel like?

What is critique?

I understand critique as the ‘art of voluntary insubordination’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 47), a way of asking the question ‘how not to be governed like that’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 44). Critique is the reminder that ‘nothing should seem impossible to change’ (Bertolt Brecht in Heritage, 2018, p. 17),it is what allows us to ‘emerge from under the shadow of inevitability’ (Tsing, 2005, p. 269), insisting that there are ‘other ways of making worlds’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 155). 

Disillusioned with all the negative judgment, I listen to those voices who suggest that critique may become otherwise. I long for a critique that ‘would multiply not judgments but signs of existence’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 323). I am particularly drawn to the notion of ‘affirmative critique’ (Staunæs et al., 2022), a mode of critique that wants to enable ‘knowing and feeling more-than what is already present’ (Staunæs et al., 2022, p. 188). With the affirmative critique, we shift from a critique of what is, the actual, to the ‘creative actualization of the virtual’(Braidotti, 2019b, p. 65). Affirmative critique often unfolds in tandem with affect theory, which also ‘insists on the generative, the possible, the new’ (Palmer, 2023, p. 122), and which ‘registers surprise at what and how things happen (Stewart, 2017, pp. 194–195). 

Towards a playful critique

Affirmative critique is like an older, supportive sibling to my tentative playful critique, which is driven by a playful spirit, always searching for things to play with. It combines ideas, thoughts, theories in potentially new, surprising  and maybe even scandalous ways, prioritising friction over smooth operations (Husted & Pors, 2020). 

The playful critique is no method, and there is no ‘methodology that I apply in the same way to different domains’ (Foucault, 2003, pp. 287–288). If method wants ‘to subdue difference’ and reduce uncertainty (MacLure, 2017, pp. 48–49), then this critique is skeptical of method, of establishing foundations and following procedures (Mazzei & Jackson, 2024; St Pierre, 2014; St. Pierre, 2021). It calls for an ethical orientation, and it requires spaces and communities where it can flourish. In this paper, I explore the playful critique through small glimpses into shared, collaborative research and writing practices.

This mode of critique attends ‘to the world around us’ (Ingold, 2021, p. 3), engages in affective attunement (Massumi & Manning, 2012; Stern, 1985, p. 142) to assess the potential for spirited encounters. The playful critique calls for a certain attitude, a willingness to ‘being a fool‘ (Lugones, 1987, p. 17), to step into the unknown, to be open to what happens and to defer judgment (Skovbjerg, 2021, p. 21). By daring to appear foolish, the playful critique can move beyond hegemonic assumptions to play with potentiality. It assumes that all matter is vibrant (Bennett, 2010), and talking animals are no longer ‘for children and primitives’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 155). The materials, the animals, everything that was made invisible by the ‘myth of disembodied rationality’ (Machin, 2022, p. 14) come alive as agential friends to play with, questioning the familiar binaries of Eurocentric Modernity (Escobar, 2020, p. 122). 

The playful critique is personal, local and situated (Haraway, 1988), it rejects any claims to objectivity and universality and takes much inspiration from autoethnography (Adams et al., 2021; Bochner & Ellis, 2022). This critique cannot be a distanced observer, it does not aim for representation, but rather, it is performative (Østern et al., 2021), embracing writing as ‘world-making’ (Wegener, 2024, p. 66) , agreeing that we must run ‘the risk of being for some worlds rather than others’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 178). This playful critique maintains that our thinking is ‘consummately social’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 360) and it aims for radical relationality and mutual empowerment(Braidotti, 2019b, p. 166). Like play, the playful critique allows us to travel between worlds and ‘travelling to them is part of loving at least some of their inhabitants’ (Lugones, 1987, p. 17). The playful critique thus insists that to enter into dialogue, to play together, is premised on a flourishing love (Freire, 1970/2000, pp. 89–90). It dreams of cultivating such love, and it is only when our critical inquiries allow us to establish a more loving relationship ‘to the world, ourselves and the other person’ (Hansen & Thorsted, 2022, p. 352 (my translation)) that we have succeeded.

The playful critique encourages pluriversal ways of knowing (Escobar, 2018, 2020; Reiter, 2018), boasting an onto-epistemological curiosity, embracing the ‘risk-taking that happens at the limit of the epistemological field’ (Butler, 2001, p. 11). When it generates theory, it is theory that aims to be ‘unsettling, disruptive, confusing’ (St. Pierre, 2021, p. 7), as it nurtures the ‘art of getting lost’ (Halberstam, 2011), of ‘not-knowing’ (de la Cadena, 2021). The playful critique is interested in awe and wonder, in enchantment and magic (Bennett, 2001), in that which reaches beyond what can be known.

When the playful critique may spark hope, it is because it reminds us that ‘in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act’ (Solnit, 2016, p. xiv). Always more concerned with and committed to the virtual, pursuing what might be possible rather than what seems given, it continues ‘to adventure beyond the safeties of the past’ (Whitehead, 1933, p. 360). Like the player who leaps into ‘precarious circumstances’  (Henricks, 2015, Locations 4140–4145), the playful critique may seek out momentary balance, but it always ventures out to yet again destabilize itself. It is a critique that aims to take over ‘a world to see it through the lens of play, to make it shake and laugh and crack because we play with it’ (Sicart, 2014, p. 24). 

What this critique most resist is being pinned down, it is fugitive and always on the verge of transformation. It cannot be accurately captured, only enacted, again and again, differently every time. Like play, the playful critique exerts a ‘continuation desire’ (Brown & Vaughan, 2010, p. 18), it wants to stay on the move, insisting that ‘all that matter is the going, the movement’ (Braidotti, 2012, p. 362). Not because it knows where to go, it merely knows we must go, that we must become otherwise, together, pursuing a kind of co-becoming (Bawaka Country et al., 2013, 2016; Lykke, 2019).

References

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