Rethinking playfulness

Play and its material-semiotic configurations are being acknowledged more and more as creative and formative forces in socio-cultural spatialization. However, subject-centered epistemologies of the roles of materiality and the thing still haunt perspectives on play. This theoretical article critically approaches and reevaluates the concept of ‘playfulness’ via affect theory in a relational ontology of play. Thinking of playfulness as a relation between bodies, things, and ideas gathered as ‘play partners’ which co-enable each other’s capacities for play evades viewing it as a causal mental state of the subject or a mere outcome of play as a practice. Rather, drawing from Lugones, playfulness can be grasped as a differential, pre-individual type of spatializing affect which is primary to play. Finally, thinking with the recent series How to Build a Sex Room, the theoretical account links to a reading of the agency of playful things in the real-and-imagined spaces of sex, kink and BDSM

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Formative assessment · Linguistics · Ontology · Pedagogy · Semiotics · Social science · Sociology · Spatialization · Anthropology · Communication · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Philosophy · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology

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