Research Seminar: Cultural Transformations (CT) and Global Studies Research Programme (GSRP) 

Forms of play 

Organizers: Matthias Stephan, Britta Timm Knudsen, Christoffer Kølvraa, and Claus Toft-Nielsen 

”If we could accept this meaninglessness of the world, then we could play with forms, appearances and our impulses, without worrying about their ultimate destination”. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange.  

According to Baudrillard’s idea of simulation, contemporary societies have all but lost any connection to what used to be considered ‘reality’. Instead, the social have become a place for the accelerated circulation, mediatization and consumption of images no longer pinned down by anything solid or external: it is a realm of play.  

Postmodern theories emphasized that such a divorce from ‘the real’ as a guarantee of 'truth' could be potentially liberating because it allowed for a ‘play’ with new social modes and forms, and paved the way for new ways of playful resistance as seduction, excess or hyperbole. Other more materially grounded theories – Deleuzian material philosophy and new materialism – have since widened the scope of the ‘real’ to include the virtuality or fictionality of the real. This means that the imagining, and temporary creation of alternative worlds that question hierarchies and pursue futurability of new modes of community, draws centrally on playful elements in building forms of cultural and social praxis.  

At our previous seminar – Playful Attitudes; Popular Culture, Politics and Participation – we focused on play and playfulness conceptually and how it appears in phenomena where you least expect it, and sometimes also in less liberating and inclusive ways. This coming seminar will focus on the ‘forms of play’ in a variety of fields of practicesuch as Fan Culture, Literature, Activism, Performance Arts and Game Culture. We will focus on which forms – such as rhetorical strategies, tactics, imitative plays, re- and pre-enactments, or the aesthetic uses of matter and site-specificity – the playful virtuality and fictionality of the real may take.   

Programme (pdf) is attached below