Decolonial queer feminist loving playfullness

The philosophy of play and games is often linked to the names of such philosophers as Hans-Georg Gadamer, who understood play as a fundamental aspect of human life and experience or Johan Huizinga the author of “Homo Ludens. The Play Element of Culture” [1]. Their universalising yet euromodern-limited [2] and prescriptive interpretations each in its own way considered the game to be the highest form of playing grounded in competition and aimed at the victory over the rivals, conquering their territory or mastering the symbols of their potency. It is opposed to the ludic behavior of non-euromodern people and/or some animals which presumably needs to be structured and equipped with rules and competencies to be able to be considered a proper game. In other words, the euromodern conceptions of games and playing grow out of the modern/colonial principle of agonistics or competitiveness which marks not only the intersubjective relations, but also politics, economics, and knowledge production, the way we treat other species and the planet. It is this agonistic framework and the hierarchy of games it generates that were questioned by decolonial queer feminist María Lugones in her by now classical article “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception” [3] . Lugones attempts to solve the riddle of understanding other cultures and individuals by means of non-agonistic playing as a space for dialogue, empathy, relationality, becoming, a genuine interest in the other instead of an arrogant perception and competition, which are ultimately grounded in dehumanizing. Hence her metaphor of travelling into other people`s realms with a loving perception and playfulness as a potential space of entrance into these otherwise possibly opaque worlds.

Lugones sees love as a special method of inquiry, when she says that “by this traveling we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes. Only when we have travelled to each other’s ‘worlds’ are we fully subjects to each other” [4] . In contrast with Huizinga and Gadamer, Lugones does not offer any detailed definitions of non-agonistic loving playfulness, rather describing it as not having rules, although being consciously intentional, not preoccupied with winning and not being grounded in rivalry, and most importantly, being open-ended and processual, marked by uncertainty and openness to surprise as well as fascination with the world. Loving playfulness is a special attitude or a way to perceive ourselves, and other people, the world around us, other species, which carries us through an activity and turns it into a play: “We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We may not have rules, and when we do have them, there are no rules that are to us sacred. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful, we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular “world.” We are there creatively. We are not passive” [5] . 

Therefore, loving playfulness is as much about encounters with others as it is about learning to know one’s multiple selves. Lugones contrasts this ludic fluidity of loving role playing with the self-important arrogant attitude of agonistic players with their fixed smug self-conceptions and ultimately, their inability to travel to other people`s worlds without destroying them. Loving playfulness is an adventure in the borderlands zone where people and other playing beings become free from the rules, control, the tyranny of disapproval and similarly to the medieval carnival participants become shapeshifters in order to temporarily turn into each other and into each other`s opposites, if not into objects and entities. Yet, in the European medieval carnival this is a short-term liberation and desacralization followed by an even stricter obeying the rules, whereas Lugones encroaches on the very principle of rules-bounded playing, thus derailing the fundamental modern-colonial onto-epistemology. Being a fool in this vague and undetermined playful borderland space is a ”combination of not worrying about the competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight” [6] .

The example that she offers to illustrate such an open and careless playfulness is not a game in itself but a ludic interpretation of an otherwise ordinary activity:  the joined breaking of the wet pebbles at the riverbank to admire the beautiful colors of the pebbles` insides is grounded in a shared fascination with the beauty of the world, infinite in its diversity and waiting to be discovered, and through this shared admiration, to learn and practice a loving attitude to the partner in playing, human or nonhuman, animate or inanimate. The partners here are not playing to compete in their throw range. Perhaps the point of this playful activity is to endlessly remake and make sense of ourselves and other selves through the loving encounter with other beings and with the world, as a result of the multispatial hermeneutics [7] . Understanding here is still possible although it is more difficult due to a lack of the shared hermeneutical horizon (for instance, if we belong to different worlds, cultures, histories, linguistic universes, species, etc.) and requires an additional effort at dialoging and experiential learning from the other, ideally in the form of playing which is only possible if we have a loving and not an arrogant perception and a self-ironic awareness of our complex relationality with others.