Playing Your Self: Modern Rhetorics of Play and Subjectivity

Abstract

Play is a universal experience for human and non-human animals. Sutton-Smith presents seven rhetorics: play as progress, play as fate, play as power, play as identity, play as frivolous, the rhetoric of the self, and play as the imaginary. For each rhetoric, Sutton-Smith introduces its history, function, main discipline, scholars and preferred form of play and of player. Distance between humans and their natural environment is the condition for the possibility of freedom and self-reflection. Social settings are studied as performances; as a result, Goffman breaks down the social performance by analogy to the elements of a stage play. There is a constitutive distance between the social self and the inner self, but the meaning of this distance is interpreted differently. The rhetorics of the self have an important consequence for the definition of play as well. The self as a player in a performance can serve as an interpretative metaphor for social interaction.