Work - 3
it seems to me that the roots of the psychoanalytic distinction between work and play can be traced back to Freud’s two principles of mental functioning (reality and pleasure) that regulate the workings of, respectively, the conscious and the unconscious. Work is presumably part of a cluster that includes reality, survival, and efficiency while play belongs to the realm of pleasure, fantasy, and disorder. Psychoanalysis, with its focus on the unconscious and its commitment to free association, would then be the ally of play and creativity contra work as the most evil of fates.
This, to me, is a little too quick. There is a fair bit of “work” going on in the unconscious, “work” that may have nothing to do with repetition or drudgery: the dream-work and the work of mourning are two classic examples here. These are highly productive processes; they effect change and have little to do with the leisure that has come to define “play.” To put it differently, I see no reason why the workings of the conscious (a logical syllogism or a cost-benefit analysis for instance) should be considered closer to “work” and hence less “pleasurable” then, say, condensation or secondary revision.
I think the distinction between work and play seems self-evident only from the point of view of a structure that has already privileged the one at the expense of the other (either work gives meaning and play is frivolity or work is servitude and play is creativity).
Might it not be more useful here to think in terms of different qualities of work and processes of production, of different types of investments and effects instead?
2 May 2008 at 12:50 pm
These are stimulating posts about work and play. My first tangential response… It’s probably no coincidence that Spielberg et al. named their production company DreamWorks: their work is to repackage the audience’s dreams, repetitively, in exchange for money.
“I think the distinction between work and play seems self-evident only from the point of view of a structure that has already privileged the one at the expense of the other (either work gives meaning and play is frivolity or work is servitude and play is creativity).”
Yes, very good: activities aren’t intrinsically either work or play, and they can exchange roles depending on the context. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud famously introduces his grandson’s fort/da game. Tossing the toy is the easy part, whereas Freud contends that it was a lot of “work” to find and retrieve the toy. However, says Freud, “there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act.” So here’s a game that’s deadly in its repetitiveness, yet the hard part affords the greatest amount of pleasure. But the boy can’t get the difficult but pleasurable “da” experience without first doing the relatively easy “fort” bit. The game is intrinsically iterative: “fort” and “da” in perpetual oscillation. Says Freud, “It can be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play.”
Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis consists of iterative cycles of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. It’s the former freeing action, which is sort of like the “fort” procedure, that provides the greatest benefit, and yet the constraining “da”-like second phase follows spontaneously and irresistibly. Again, it seems like the work of return is more fun than the disinhibiting action of play. Besides, the territory always resists being subjected to acts of destruction, forcing play to work very hard indeed.
9 May 2008 at 11:14 pm
Hannah Arendt’s distiinction between work and labor (in the Human Condtition) would be helpful here.
1 July 2008 at 11:54 pm
It’s been two months since your last post. Are you taking a permanent break from the blog, or waiting for new inspiration to strike?
9 July 2008 at 9:05 am
Actually neither. I was on a very well deserved vacation, then had to check proofs, and finally came the task of indexing said proofs. (The last was a truly cumbersome process and I have since gained much respect for professional indexers!). Winnicott is on my agenda now, especially around the division between work and play, and I shall resume with the posts very soon. Hope all is well on your side. F