674 - Ludic Self

Nice quote, Pat Kane, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For A Different Way Of Living (2004), p.48:

"But the idea of a 'playful self', of a self that plays with its boundaries and masks, was birthed long before tricksy ad campaigns and postmodern theory. The clear starting point is Renaissance literature, and that list of writers - from Rabelais, Erasmus and Machiavelli, to Shakespeare, Donne and Marvell - who used their art to imagine a self that was not validated by Church, nobility or tradition. And their most favourite strategy was the ludic self - a literary persona that toyed with the very idea of being a single unitary consciousness."

Also, earlier in the chapter, a telling reference to the effect that the opposite of play is not work, it is depression.

And for the record, the chapter explores Brian Sutton-Smith's six rhetorics of play, which are:

• Play as progress
• Play as imagination
• Play as selfhood
• Play as fate and chaos
• Play as shared identity
• Play as contest