Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Marcacci, Bob

83
POEMBOB MARCACCI
turn to the person next to you 
   if there should be one 
                                       at this moment 
      you know enough about each other in smoke and background 
                           noise 
 
            turn to the person next to you and turn on 
                 the one who is there and look 
                     how loud a glance can be 
                    reach and feel me on this warm sea between us 
                         put both eyes into it and i have to 
                                                  hand it to you 
                as evening goes cold 
 
turn to the person next to you again 
    again with glances glasses contacts lashes 
            these silent crashes with one another 
                  as we look on and listen to what 
                       between words happens in a span 
          that could be a poem 
                                             i reach into you 
 
   turn to the person next to you and try 
          to know these thoughts 
        that bring expression 
            as we breathe and feel passing moments 
                as we take those things which escape 
                                            and reveal us
Bob Maracacci is a California Vacavillian presently living and writing in Beijing, China. 
His recent work has appeared in Chicago Postmodern Poetry, Moria, Ocho and Zafusy, 
among others. He is the host of the International Literary Open Mic every Wednesday 
evening at The Bookworm in Beijing, and PJ for The Countdown at <http://miporadio.
blogspot.com/>.
 
Marcacci – Poem (No Title) – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007


English

Poem (no title)

Schmidt, Leoni

7
LEONI SCHMIDT
Editorial: Registers of  Play
When thinking about registers of play and their embeddedness in the tradition of Western 
philosophy for the sake of this editorial, Simona Levescu’s synopsis “from Plato to Derrida 
and Theories of Play”1 is useful as she briefly lists the main issues, the key figures and their 
ideas about play.  She commences her piece by pointing out that the idea of play occupies 
a central role “within the activity of discovering or encountering knowledge” and she argues 
that the idea seems to be as central in its importance within the history of philosophy as 
truth, knowledge, meaning and value. Her survey of theories of play over time points out its 
deployment in Greek thought: Socrates addresses serious issues in a playful manner and 
does not consider work and play to be opposites; Plato admits the importance of motivated, 
structured play; and the Greek word for education and culture (paideia) shares the same 
etymology as the word for play, game, pastime, and sport (paidia). 
To theorise play during medieval times, Levescu refers to Mikhail Bakhtin who defines “the 
carnivalesque, which promoted the profane, the vulgar, and the grotesque, the celebration 
of wine, dance, and the obscene as an expression of resistance to the official high culture of 
the [medieval] nobility, the Church and the State.” The carnivalesque deployed structured 
forms of ludic (or ordered) play to create communities of resistance even if their duration was 
fleeting and had to become subservient to control again.4 
Levescu points out that play and art become connected in Western philosophy in the late 
eighteenth century. She presents Kant’s belief that “free art [as contrasted to craft] could 
only turn out purposive if it is play, in other words, an occupation that is agreeable on its 
own account.”5 With Plato, Kant argues for structured play and mentions prosody and metre 
in poetry as examples of structuring mechanisms: “Without this the spirit which in art must 
be free and which alone animates the work, would have no body at all and would evaporate 
completely.”6 Within the same timeframe, the philosopher friedrich Schiller argues that play 
can bridge the gap between the realms of ideas and materials.7 
Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (198) then becomes the focus in Levescu’s survey. He 
defines human beings as playful and argues that play is a fundamental fact of every human 
expression. He writes: “The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than 
culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; 
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 7, Dec 006
8
poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play…We have 
to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from 
play…It arises in and as play, and never leaves it.”8  
She also returns to Bakhtin who, in the decades between the two world wars, argues for dialogic 
play, that is to say, for interplay amongst “social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, 
professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups…of 
various circles and passing fashions.”9 Thus he inserts social and political dimensions into 
the theorisation of play.
Levescu continues and focuses briefly on the contribution of Hans Georg Gadamer with his 
notion that playfulness takes place within the work of art itself, which led the way for other 
later twentieth-century theorists to analyse this phenomenon in greater detail. One of these is 
Roland Barthes, whose now famous 1977 essay translated as “from Work to Text” positions 
his notion of the infinite playfulness of the signifier within a text.10 for Michel foucault the 
activity of writing is the “interplay of signs” and it has a political dimension involving the play 
of power.11 
The survey includes mention of feminist theorists like Maria Lugones who, during the later 
part of the twentieth century, built on these notions when arguing that “play facilitates feminist 
philosophy.”1 Feminist writers Toni King and Eloise Buker identify five levels of play: critical 
play, creative play, healing play, transcendent play and oppositional play.1 While they take 
play at face value, Jacques Derrida questions the very ontology of play where he argues that 
it negates itself in the very moment of its definition. He states that it is either nothing and 
then cannot be theorised as it is alogos or without discourse; or it becomes something and 
then its very essence is under erasure. 14 
And finally, Levescu concludes her survey by countering Derrida’s ideas as follows: “An 
important aspect that surrounds play is that it needs a shape, a contour, a structure: it must 
have some set of arbitrarily chosen and assumed rules at a given time...[otherwise] it would 
be impossible to say that it has evaporated; there would be nobody left to call it alogos, under 
erasure, or totally erased, for Huizinga’s homo ludens would probably have disappeared, or 
never existed at all.”15 
The contributions to this issue of Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue engage in 
different registers with the notion of ‘play’ and these can be read in relation to Levescu’s brief 
historical survey. Tony Schirato, for example, refers to Huizinga, while critiquing his approach to 
play as mythical through an alignment with the writing of Bakhtin and the sociologists Marcel 
Mauss, Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois. He analyses a recent Nike television commercial 
that portrays the relation between the notion of play and the contemporary cultural field of 
sport, demonstrating how play resists and emerges, despite institutional attempts to banish it. 
Leena Laine’s contribution also speaks of play as resistance in the women’s play movement 
in finland during the early twentieth century. She explores the tensions between sport as a 
competitive activity and play as a terrain which resisted its strategies in finland and Sweden 
during that era. She reviews “the notion of ‘play’ as a political strategy and [gives] examples 
of adapting play as counter-strategy to competitive sport.”  
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 7, Dec 006
9
Competitive sport, however, features in Matani’s Schaaf’s exploration of élite male Pacific rugby 
players’ perceptions and experiences of professional rugby in Aotearoa/New Zealand.  He  points 
out that “…sport participation research has been dominated by Western theories and models” 
and counter-strategises by beginning “to identify the specific cultural factors that motivate 
a disproportionate number of Pacific Island men, in New Zealand at least, to play sports.” 
As play and adult art – like play and sport – may sometimes be antithetical to each 
other, Josephine Regan responds by emphasising art’s playful aspects as a continuous 
and processual occupation framed through the notion of ‘flow’ as theorised by Mihaly 
Czikszentmihalyi. She explores notions of ‘art’ and ‘play’ as overlapping concepts, and she 
suggests that “creative activity or creative occupation is an innate need for human homeostasis 
and self-actualisation.”  
“Playing with the Image: In Conversation with Margaret Roberts” is the result of a flowing 
collaborative interview between the artist Margaret Roberts, and the writer, Leoni Schmidt. 
Again, the processual nature of art is emphasised through an exploration of how it comes into 
being. With reference to Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist notions of the social production of space, 
Schmidt theorises this activity as critical – and serious – play. 
Hans van Ditmarsch provides insights into the world of games such as Cluedo and Sudoku. 
His argues that play is serious, however much we may think of it and experience it as fun, 
and however much we should do so.  He points out that there are “important insights to be 
gained by applying various scientific disciplines to the analysis of frivolous pastimes.”  
This issue also includes poetry, autobiographical writing, artists’ pages and reviews of books 
and an exhibition. Judith Arcana contributes a poem entitled Eight through which we are 
reminded that the imaginative constructs of children’s dreams and daydreams involve play 
and that the Greek paideia (for education and culture) and paidia (for play, game, pastime 
and sport) are closely linked to paides for children.
Jim Cooper incorporates the ‘child-like’ through excessive play in his translation of the album 
cover for the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, created in the radical 
left climate of the late 1960s. Here one can counter Roger Caillois (as referenced by Schirato) 
– where he declares that art does not count as play as it produces material goods – through 
attention to the artist’s voluntary labour without capital gain as constituting play in today’s 
postconceptual art context. 
Madeleine Child’s Pop-pop produces large numbers of play-like objects in order to suggest 
our children’s over-consumption of fast food ‘cheezels’ and popcorn. But, however much we 
want to criticise the kinds of food referenced, we cannot help but be seduced by the colours 
and glazes used and thus Child’s work does not merely state, but also performs the very 
dilemma each parent faces when it comes to their children’s food choices.
Annemarie Jutel’s autobiographical writing conjures a poignant picture of the uneven power 
relationships within a children’s physical education class. The ‘clumsy’ child has to compete 
in such a context, whether willingly or not. Endurance and a drive to succeed help her to 
overcome the problems inherent in such a location for ‘play’. In contrast, Jane venis embraces 
the a-rhythmic and discordant aspects of life in her sound-sculpture-performance practice. 
She revels in things that may fall apart and has made the clumsy and ‘wrong’ strong elements 
of her playful work. 
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 7, Dec 006
10
Ali Bramwell’s curatorial review of an exhibition entitled “Play” – which recently featured the 
work of five emerging artists in Dunedin, New Zealand – explores how the works “set up a 
series of play-ful relations between histories, modes of practice and content.” Macabre toys, 
game spaces, conjurer tricks, mounted trophies of sportswomen, and crocheted pieces 
referencing royalty play in various ways. 
Where Annemarie Jutel earlier provides us with a particular instance of a child’s experience 
of play in the context of physical education; her book review of Julie Myerson’s Not a Games 
Person contextualises her personal experience within the larger frame of competitive sport 
and its effects in the playground and further afield. She writes: “Games are a normalising force 
– one which structures the playground, but also the corporate board room with its language 
of playing fields, goals, targets and fair play.”
Bridie Lonie reviews three texts in conjunction for this issue: Karen Armstrong’s A Short 
History of Myth; Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus; 
and Jeannette Winterson’s The Weight. She explores how templates for play in successful 
films, reality television and games are based on Greek myths; and how advertising uses these 
to play with our need for identification with mythic figures. Lonie also points out how the re-
telling of myths can be a way of making a form of play of the hard details of life – another 
context for another register of play.
 1 Simona Levescu, “from Plato to Derrida and Theories of Play”, Comparative Literature and Culture: 
A WWWeb Journal, 5 (4), December 00, as last visited at http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/
clcweb0-4/livescu0.html on 1 November 006.
  Ibid., 1.
  Lauren Langman, “The ‘Carnival Character’ of the Present Age”, The Sociology Shop, 00, as last 
visited at http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/langfr2.html on 1 November 006. MM 
Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl 
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 001), 1-5. 
 4 See Lauren Langman, “The ‘Carnival Character’ of the Present Age”, The Sociology Shop, 00, as 
last visited at http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/langfr2.html on 1 November 006.
 5 I Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 171.
 6 Ibid. 
 7 See endnote 1, .
 8 J Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 198/1964), 17.
 9 MM Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination, trans. 
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 001), 6-6. 
 10 Roland Barthes, “from Work to Text”, in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New york: Hill 
and Wang, 1997), 161. Also see as last visited on 1 November 006: http://www.georgetown.
edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Barthes-fromWorktoText.html.
 11 Michel foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in vincent B Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and 
Criticism (New york: Norton, 001), 16-6.
 1 See endnote 1, 105.
 1 Toni C King and Eloise A Buker, “ ‘To and fro’: Deepening the Soul Life of Women’s Studies Through 
Play”,  National Women’s Studies Association Journal, 1 (1), 001: 105-5.
 14 vincent B Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New york: Norton, 001), 1866.
 15 See endnote 1, 4. Acknowledgements to Simona Levescu whose article informs this editorial.
Schmidt – Editorial – Junctures, 7, Dec 006


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