Description
This paper explores the extent to which play can operate as an antidote to the arch-seriousness of World Politics and IR. While usually treated as singularly unserious both in and beyond the academy, drawing on political, social, and philosophical theorisations of play, the paper seeks to trace play’s potential to precipitate powerful disruptions to the rigidities and absurdities of the (ostensibly) serious. At the same time, it moves beyond an idealised or romanticised analysis which locates in play the solution to the exclusionary power relations and marginalisations at work in the serious. The paper begins by conceptualising the ‘spark of silliness’ at work in play – understood as distinct from forms of gameplay with which it is often conflated in the current ludic century – seeking to excavate something of the ‘lifeiness’ of its embodied experiential effects. From there, it examines some possible panaceas of play, emphasising the extent to which it is recuperable into forms of global ordering. Finally, it deconstructs the binary logic operating in the association of play with silliness and non-play (such as work or academic study) with the serious by tracing the seriousness with which people play, and the silliness they bring to ostensibly serious spheres of life. It concludes that we should take seriously the silliness of play as a site of potentially radical disruption to the constraints of the serious.
