Potential Spaces: Play as Political Praxis
Our previous blog post included reflections on the current state of the internet and that there is no time and space for real alternatives. But such bleak visions were not always in place. The early days of the internet and online culture in the 1980s and 90s were filled with potential, utopian imaginations and, for some, a revolutionary spirit. The internet scholar Sherry Turkle theorised the online identity of those days as one of playfulness and creativity:
Alone with your thoughts, yet in contact with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play. At the screen, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. (Turkle 2011, 187)
In a similar vein, Jason Parham writes about the internet of the early 2000s:
In the dawning days of the millennium, a great harvest was promised. A new class of young revolutionists, who saw the world as not yet living up to its grandeur and thus felt the duty to order it in their vision, vowed a season of abundance and grand prosperity. (Parham 2018, online, cited in Cook 2020, 19)
Looking back, there is surely a sense of nostalgia at play when contrasting today’s internet with that of its earlier days. The early internet, although being essentially created by the state for military purposes, was not colonised by capital as it is today.
We find it apt to describe the state of the internet at the time as a potential space, one that invited various potentials for the unfolding of human creativity, collaboration, and meaningful communication.
Winnicott’s potential space
The term ‘potential space’ also has a different meaning. It was coined by the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott around 1971 (Winnicott 2002). For Winnicott, the potential space refers to an intersubjective space, which is both real and imaginary-virtual, created between the baby and their caregiver/s. The potential space is facilitated by the mother/father/other when they play with the young child.
In playing, a space is created that is shared between them. It gives rise to creativity and trust, and enables the baby to move from total dependence towards a sense of independence and agency. The baby begins to perceive themself as a separate being from their environment and the subjects around them. They may play with the mother, for example, or may also play alone in the mother’s presence. Winnicott argued that this space is the first place of cultural experience and creativity for the subject: ‘Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested in play’ (ibid, 135).
Related to this space is the notion of the so-called ‘transitional object’. This object can be a teddy bear or blanket that has immense value for the baby. In the potential space of play, the transitional object has the status of an objectively given entity — i.e. it really is a teddy that someone gave to the baby — and the status of a subjectively created entity — i.e. the baby has created and animated the teddy to be a life-like being invested with love and care. In playing with the transitional object, the infant puts their omnipotence into action and makes the transitional object ‘do’ as they wish.
The transitional object is crucial, as any parent can attest, and often soothing for children. ‘This is particularly important for the child when the mother is absent or there is a feeling of loneliness or an anxiety of some kind. The transitional object helps the infant cope with feelings of loss,’ Winnicott observes (ibid, 12).
Play as a mode of politics
Thus, playing is essential for all human beings. The French psychoanalyst André Green writes, ‘Play is a manifestation of the mind that I understand as being the result of undoing the pieces belonging to reality, in order to recombine them and create a potential existence’ (Green 2005, 21). Playing, at any level, is thus always about fantasy, utopia, and creativity.
While we can also conceptualise today’s social media platforms as enabling play, or as consisting of playful elements (Johanssen 2018), earlier manifestations of the internet were much more characterised by a sense of playing and playfulness than today. Seen in this light, playing — particularly as opposed to a more structured gaming that follows specific rules of a game of chess, for example — is about transgressing and unleashing potentialities.
Such playful modes of being were present online in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s in the form of chat rooms, personal homepages, Usenet groups, and games. We can even see phenomena that are more recent, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, blogging, Anonymous, 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr, and quite a few others as examples of the kind of internet we are describing here.
They all, like the figure of the cyborg, rejected or redefined boundaries between humans and machines, fantasy and reality, hope and the status quo. The internet is an explosive and seductive symbiosis of objectively given structures (networks, code, interfaces, servers, files, etc.) and subjectively created meaning (content, communication, care, love, cooperation, arousal, passion, aggression, destruction, etc).
Redefining possibilities through play
Today, such potentials are still to be found online. We can see it in acts of solidarity, empathic communication, or transformative education. However, they are far and few between. Rather, play has been co-opted by various platforms and UX designs in order to elicit certain behaviours from its users. In many instances, the potential space of the internet has been undermined by capital, Right-wing forces, and a collector mentality.
The challenge of today’s politics is especially difficult, because control offers itself as play. The potential space, both in the Winnicottian sense and the more general sense, is not an innocent terrain, but one in which ideology plants its first seeds. Left-wing politics that does not take into account this element of play will always find itself losing to practices of power.
Resistance, then, must be playful — not in the sense that the Left has to play along with memes and other common practices of online culture, but in the sense that it needs to redefine play itself as a space to explore new potentials and possibilities.
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References
Green, A. (2005). Play and Reflection in D. W. Winnicott’s Writings. London: Karnac Books.
Johanssen, J. (2018). Gaming–Playing on Social Media: Using the Psychoanalytic Concept of “Playing” to Theorize User Labour on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society 21(9). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1450433.
Parham, J. (2018). Facebook and the Price of Tech Utopia. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-price-oftech-utopia/.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Winnicott, D. W. (2002). Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.
