“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.