Playing Against Alienation

Taking an interest in the political influence of play, which I take to be a catalyst and resistant dimension of experience, and investigating the orientation of the political models to which it is drawn unveiled an affinity between the visions flourishing in play and a Marxist model of emancipation from alienation. From here, I put play to a test of political significance: taking up Huizinga’s notion of its occurrence outside ordinary life, I argue that play, through a certain cultivation of individual and collective qualities crucial in anticapitalistic consciousness, can amount not to a numbing trick of compliance with the dominant order, nor to merely a liberating-feeling but politically neutral distraction, but to an experience of both prefiguration and resistance that is politically transformative, precisely in a Marxist sense of liberation from alienation and capitalist class exploitation.