The Practice of Misuse by Malewitz Raymond

Author:Malewitz, Raymond [Malewitz, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

5

Ritual, Play, and Neoliberal Rugged Consumerism

Giorgio Agamben dedicates a chapter of his book Infancy and History (1978) to the relationship between ritual and play. Following Lévi-Strauss, he initially classifies the terms as antithetical:

[T]he function of rites is to adjust the contradiction between mythic past and present, annulling the interval separating them and reabsorbing all events into the synchronic structure. Play, on the other hand, furnishes a symmetrically opposed operation: it tends to break the connection between past and present, and to break down and crumble the whole structure into events. If ritual is therefore a machine for transforming diachrony into synchrony, play, conversely, is a machine for transforming synchrony into diachrony. (83)

For Agamben, the difference between play and ritual is most visible in encounters with certain kinds of objects—most prominently toys, which he aligns with Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage. Both categories of objects use “‘crumbs’ or ‘scraps’ belonging to other structural wholes,” and both “belonged—once, no longer, to the realm of the sacred or of the practical-economic” (81, 80). To play with an object is to remove it from certain networks of power that stabilize its use-value and to therefore “break the [object’s] connection between past and present.” Ritualized interactions with objects serve the opposite function of stabilizing that value through the instantiation of laws of sanctioned use.

Agamben ends his argument by suggesting that the conversion of sacred or practical objects into toys (or toys back into sacred or practical objects) is never complete, because “every game . . . contains a ritual aspect and every rite an aspect of play, which often makes it awkward to distinguish one from the other.” From this overlap, he concludes: “we can regard ritual and play not as two distinct machines but as a single machine, a single binary system, which is articulated across two categories which cannot be isolated and across whose correlation and difference the very functioning of the system is based” (83–84). Agamben’s discussion of the overlap between ritual and play—between synchronic and diachronic tendencies—offers insight into the difficulties of positioning rugged consumerism as a critique of the “practical-economic” structures of late capitalism, particularly given the neoliberal philosophies through which this system is disseminated. On one hand, playful acts of rugged consumerism separate objects from their original use-values and replace older “practical-economic” behaviors with novel and potentially oppositional ones. On the other hand, these activities take place within an economic system predicated upon the creative destruction and reassembly of consumer desires, objects, industries, and workers and which, as Fredric Jameson (among others) has shown, depends upon the conversion of historical behaviors into a playful and politically ineffectual pastiche. As Jameson argues, after the exhaustion of the “high modernist ideology of style . . . the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past” (Postmodernism, 17–18). The emergent “historicism” in art is characterized by “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusions, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the primacy of the ‘neo’” (Postmodernism, 18).

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