Joyful Digressions: Going Gonzo

Abstract

Within this article, we attempt to counter the seriousness that sometimes tends to weigh down academic pursuits. Although we acknowledge the necessary anchors that tether us to various obligations in our work, we enact a form of play that emerged over the course of our dissertations and extended into our budding careers. We call this form “going Gonzo.” By recounting the emergence of trickster figure within our work—who we simply call “Phillip”—we demonstrate how this form of play enabled us to strategically pull back and stretch forward in moments and spaces of intense tension. Ultimately, we describe this trickster in relation to a ludic logic of embracing the profane, foolish, and tenuously important as a way to garner levity and buoyancy amid the necessary anchors of seriousness of research.

Keywords

play trickster gonzo serious writing

Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. (Massumi, 2002, p. 18)

There seems to us precious little space to celebrate play, levity, and joy amid the otherwise overwrought seriousness of research. This is not because play is absent in the research endeavor, but because the very idea of play seems out of place with the seriousness that tends to suffuse the task of research. And to our dismay, this seriousness is often mistaken for importance. Yet, contrary to seriousness, importance leaves room for play. “Importance,” like “play,” is a term of positive, inclusive value. Importance can include play, but seriousness is “defined by and exhausted in the negation of ‘play’”—seriousness “is simply ‘not playing’ and nothing more” (Huizinga, 1944/1949, p. 45).

Research risks inelasticity when it excludes play, when it mistakes importance for seriousness. In ways similar to how creativity necessarily accompanies science, and how philosophy accompanies art (Murphie, 2008), we believe the ludic act of play necessarily should accompany the act of research. When the tethers that anchor us to our various projects, research, or otherwise, become too taut, too fraught with seriousness, a little slack to pragmatically pull back or stretch forward may prove to be the lifeline we desperately need.

Concerns related to research questions, objects of knowledge, and methodological and theoretical consistency are all serious matters that come with the territory of doing research. These concerns vary according to research traditions, institutional and disciplinary conventions, stipulations, expectations, and histories, but they invariably anchor our work to obligatory necessities. These necessary anchors can, and often do, sink deep into the abyss of seriousness, drowning out the equally important dynamics of play. Play’s dynamic to pull back and stretch forward is important not only in research and writing but also in contending for affirmative ways of living and sustaining ourselves (Frentz, 2008). We believe, along with Dewsbury (2010), that “we can miss a trick if we solely task ourselves in our research to live up to reality, when it is precisely about finding alternative methodological strategies for living with reality” (p. 333). Frentz (2008) celebrated the importance of play and how it is crucial not only for life but also for research. By invoking a playful, imaginative figure of a trickster, Frentz was able to augment his capacities for thought and action, inventing strategies to not just live up to reality but also live with it. We call for a similar ludic logic.

A Call for Ludic Logic

We advocate for play as a lifeline, a buoy, and a margin of maneuverability amid various anchors within the research enterprise. Methodology is certainly a pronounced anchor, often assumed to provide stability, structure, and unambiguous guidance toward clearly defined ends or outcomes. Yet despite the best laid plans and designs, life and research are often complexly and ambiguously intertwined, requiring that we contend not only for knowledge but also for ways of being. After all, as Law (2004) asserted, methodology is “most fundamentally, about a way of being. . . . about the kinds of people that we want to be, and about how we should live” (p. 10). Far from being an innocuous set of procedures, protocols, and structuring processes, methodology is always already laden with political importance (Law, 2004; Dewsbury, 2010; Kumm & Berbary, 2018).

According to Law (2004), the decisions we make in relation to the design and implementation of research privilege and even enact certain realities at the exclusion of others.

Those decisions are arguably conformal to a structuring image of thought of seriousness, of how we can live, the work we can do, and how we navigate the straits of research. An image of thought is a spatial “system of coordinates, dynamisms, orientations: what it means to think, and to ‘orient oneself in thought’” (Deleuze, 1990/1997, p. 148). Within research, the coordinates are often rigidly punctuated, the dynamisms intense, and the orientations entrenched. We commonly find ourselves connecting the dots along our research training, acquiescing to our progenitors’ worldviews, and being swept away by the political dynamics and pressures of contending for a life in the academy. We may even “come to think that it is real” (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013, p. 631), that our goal is merely “to live up to reality” (Dewsbury, 2010, p. 333), and forget that it is, “most fundamentally, about a way of being” (Law, 2004, p. 10). In other words, we may lose sight of the real importance of research, the potential to make a difference in how we live, think, and feel in relation to this world, reducing it to an automaton practice—as if one were merely painting-by-numbers.

Although we do not concern ourselves with the critique of any particular method or methodological approach per se, we do question the logic and seriousness of a so-called “natural inclination of thought toward truth” that is often assumed to materialize by “following preexisting paths” (Bogue, 2003, p. 174). We question method as a “more or less bankable guarantee,” assuring that “if you do your methods properly,” you will arrive at “stable conclusions about the way things really are” (Law, 2004, p. 9). To our way of thinking, play is nonconformal and resistant to such absurdities. Play begs for relinquishing tight control, rigid structures, and embrace practices of “deliberate imprecision” (Law, 2004, p. 3). It beckons to duck off the marked trails, to redraw the map, to take joy in digressions, and to admit that we do not always know which way to go (Dewsbury, 2010; Law, 2004; Massumi, 2002, 2014).

We call for a ludic logic that “does not recognize any rigid opposition between the frivolous and the serious” (Massumi, 2014, p. 40), nor accept “utility as the criterion” of value for research (p. 39). Rather, ludic logic loosens our anchors and adds greater elasticity to our tethers, buoying research amid its serious demands. To this end, we offer a brief account of our invention of a playful trickster, similar to that of Frentz (2008)—a shape shifter that enlivened, moved across, and extended our individual doctoral research projects as well as subsequent collaborative scholarship. Our trickster—Phillip—played alongside the tensions of our serious anchors by way of inside jokes, playful language, and compositional styles. Below, we introduce Phillip and explain how he came about in our work together.

The Weight of Anchors and Play’s Suspension: Inventing Phillip

Phillip first emerged during Joseph’s (second author) dissertation research, a phenomenology of connections with and to music (cf. Pate, 2012; Pate & Johnson, 2013; Pate & Kumm, 2017). Phillip was the pseudonym chosen by Brian (first author) who was a participant in that study. During that time, Brian was deep in the throes of his master’s thesis, which was a phenomenological exploration of songwriting (cf. Kumm, 2011, 2013; Kumm & Johnson, 2014). Brian chose the pseudonym of Phillip after watching an episode of The Mighty Boosh (King, 2004), a British situational comedy where the main characters explore the pitfalls of becoming writers. One character, Vince Noir, seems to have all the luck. He is charming, witty, and playful. The other character, Howard Moon, is serious, pensive, and deliberate, and he seldom wins the various games played out on screen. During a meeting with the local Shaman, Howard pays 159 Euros for a photograph of two kittens sitting in a barrel. The Shaman explains to Howard that whenever he feels angry he should look at the kittens and feel calm, and one of the kittens happens to be named Phillip. From his inception, there was always already an element of play in Philip, something of an emergent trickster. There was something humorous, ludic, and trickster-esque—at least to Brian, who chose the pseudonym—in naming oneself after a kitten. Although Phillip came to be in a conventional—albeit playful—way (i.e., a participant in a research study choosing a pseudonym), he later morphed into a multiplicity of subjectivities and voices in Brian’s dissertation, and continued to shift forms in our subsequent work, blurring the boundaries of our individual projects and personal lives.

Waiting and Letting It Play Out

Joseph had designed his research to include moments of “play,” moments where participants literally played recorded music that held significant meaning for them. As we later reflected upon Joseph’s research, we recalled how those moments unfolded with curious pauses, slight chuckles, and quizzical glances, which for us, became micro ludic acts to help ease the seriousness we were both experiencing in our respective academic lives. For example, when Brian-as-Phillip played a specific song during his interviews, he interrupted Joseph’s attempts to discuss the music Brian had chosen by saying, “Wait, let it play out.” Joseph responded in those moments with a silent, quizzical pause, tilting his head back to the small portable speakers and away from his note pad.

Although Joseph was unaware of how this sort of play was manifesting in the interviews at the time, we later concluded that those moments were perhaps why the data generated that was specifically related to Phillip proved to be particularly intriguing during the analysis process. For example, Joseph drew on the “Wait, let it play out” moment when his computer crashed, allowing him to approach that moment differently, more playfully:

My computer died. I’m sitting here, after hours of panicked weeping and frantic yet unfruitful attempts to repair my computer, after a long walk by the river. . . But on my walk I ducked off the trail to a tree that had fallen, and I just paced back and forth kicking at the bark and thinking about everything. If I’m honest, I’m mostly thinking about my agenda, my end, my product, what this thing is supposed to be. I’m on the fifth of my “Ellijay Sessions.” I’m supposed to be finalizing this manuscript style dissertation, but . . . I mean I’m bouncing on this tree like a kid, playing around and being stupid, and I then remember when my kids were born. I made each of them a mixtape for their births. That and that song Phillip played; I wanted to talk about it, but he kept saying, “wait, let it play out.” I guess what I’m saying is it has to play out. I literally can’t do this now, but I’m going to make a mix to play it out with. (Joseph’s Audio Research Journal, January 4, 2012)

By waiting and letting it play out, Joseph reworked, reimagined, and even reinvented the direction his dissertation took. Instead of a manuscript style dissertation, it became a musical composition, with an accompanying musical compilation, that served as a polyvocal-textualizing of music listening (Pate & Kumm, 2017).

Inspired by both of our earlier research projects related to music making and listening, Brian soon became intrigued by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/2011) statement that “music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times it gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily, being extinguished” (p. 299). This statement became the cornerstone of Brian’s doctoral dissertation, and he set himself on a trajectory to explore a Spinozan–Deleuzian conception of joy within the context of music using theories of affect (Clough, 2007, 2009; Deleuze, 1970/1988; Massumi, 2002; Sedgwick & Frank, 1995; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010; Spinoza, 1677/1994; Stewart, 2007) as his methodological and theoretical guide. After 6 months of carefully setting up his dissertation, Brian finally sat down to write about the various augmentations, extensions, and increased capacities of life that may be called an ontology of joy, or what he was calling “intensities of life” (Kumm, 2015). But death interrupted the flow. Early on a Tuesday morning, when Brian sat down to finally write about “joy,” his mother called and informed him that a close friend’s 9-year-old son had just died. As Brian later reflected in his research journal, he literally could not do the work, just as Joseph wrote about above, but for different reasons:

Joy is forever gone. At least I can’t write about it. It’s pointless. Worse than that, it seems profane. I can’t write about this, especially now that I’m missing another deadline for the chapter. It’s all wrong; I’m miserable; I can’t find my voice in it anymore. (Brian’s Research Journal, June 25, 2014)

Brian called Joseph to talk through the situation. After listening for several hours, Joseph offered a modest suggestion: “What you’re talking about is no less an intensity of life than what you were talking about with music; as a father, I can’t imagine anything more intense. Just because it doesn’t feel good doesn’t mean it’s not important.” Joseph then recommended that Brian write about the situation and consider that “other part of what ‘your guys’ [Deleuze and Guattari] said”: “a taste for death . . . being extinguished” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2011, p. 299). On his advice, Brian wrote about the intensities of living when another is “being extinguished” way too soon, and what it might mean to live intensely, musically, and even joyfully in ways worthy of all that happens to us. But as Brian wrote, he wrote as Phillip, often mixing Joseph’s words with his own, because Phillip could say all the things that seemed otherwise impossible to articulate.

Phillip could hazard the risk of questioning whether he wanted to live or not. He could acknowledge the foolishness and necessity of writing about joy when it seemed profane. Phillip could talk about getting high to release mounting anxiety. Brian, on the contrary, had to play the straight man; he could not be so uninhibited. He wrangled all of Phillip’s ravings, which were in large part his own, into a theoretically sophisticated account of affect, politics of life and death, and an ethical treatment of “life as virtual suicide” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 135)—all very serious matters. But he let Phillip, as a combination of Brian and Joseph, rave wildly as a trickster who could maneuver through the traumatic experience of death, add levity to the seriousness of the experience, and afford an alternative strategy to live with this harsh reality.

Although under entirely different circumstances, Phillip also became an uninhibited livewire for Joseph. As Joseph struggled to find his voice in his own writing, he drew inspiration from Brian-as-Phillip’s playful descriptions of his music listening experience to maneuver through the difficulties related to what Joseph could legitimately say without fear of reprisal. As an emergent trickster, Phillip was Joseph’s way to maneuver potential pitfalls around serious (and straight-faced) language. Joseph wrote in his research journal about Phillip’s description of music, for example:

Phillip said, “It’s like feeling The Who in your balls.” I could never write that, except that Phillip said it. When everyone talks about resonation or resonating feelings, they do so in the sense of general emotional sympathy. But Phillip means it literally. Sound vibrates in his balls. I can’t talk about balls in my dissertation, but Phillip can. (Joseph’s Audio Research Journal, February 7, 2012)

For us, the important thing about Phillip, whether in or out of the guise of Brian or Joseph, was the situations in which he made his appearances. Phillip showed up at the most serious junctures of our work. When deadlines, missed or looming just on the horizon, pressured for increased productivity, Phillip showed up; when the work was literally suspended, put on hold, indefinitely or just until a new computer arrived, Phillip joined the dynamic. In those moments of absolute seriousness—the death of a child, the death of a computer—as well as the self-imposed seriousness of our agendas, plans, and research designs—we felt the weight of anchors. Yet, through the encounters with Phillip, the importance of completing our work began to blur into equally important, playful experiences (e.g., a mixtape for the birth of a child; saying the otherwise unthinkable under a pseudonym or through a raving trickster; or feeling music resonate in your balls).

Where our work was set on “pause,” there arose a potential for play, which, according to Massumi (2014), always involves the suspension of normative rules and functions of our various activities. For both of us, this involved the suspension of our agendas, what we thought we were supposed to do, the rigidity of which was largely self-imposed. The rules of writing, and more precisely, writing it right, were suspended. Joseph began playing with music, making a compilation to accompany his dissertation, which required the listener-as-reader to literally select the “play” function on a CD player (Pate, 2012). Brian, on the contrary, began writing in another voice altogether, once he surmised that his voice had been lost (Kumm, 2015). Thoughts circulated quite differently, quite literally, in musical and theoretical movements in this space where the “rules” were set on pause. When Phillip made his appearances, he came in as a trickster: he came in to loosen things up, to remind us to not be so serious, and to leave room for the importance of play.

With the suspension of our more serious work, we began to experiment with forms, styles, and voices, more ludic in nature than originally allowed by the designs we had initially prescribed to our work. Phillip helped us play. His figuring was malleable enough to shift forms and shapes across our dissertations, afforded in disorienting moments where the suspension of work forced a ducking off the marked trail, refolding of the map, admitting we did not know which way to go. Phillip helped us shift our focus from the products of our dissertations to the processes of waiting and letting it play out. He induced enough elasticity in the tethers that anchored us to our work to strategically pull back, stretch forward, or even flick a problem into another register.

Playing Toward a Different Register of Existence

Phillip’s playful influence did not stop at our dissertations. In December 2015, months after successfully defending his dissertation and graduating, Brian sent Joseph a mix of songs that always made Brian smile in their playful exuberance. Brian signed the inside of the mixed tape case as Phillip, knowing Joseph would get the multilayered joke: part of which was a reference to Joseph’s “jam sessions” methodology chapter in his dissertation, which Brian-as-Phillip helped him think through; partly about our friendship, which somewhat exemplifies the “jamming” concept of give and take; and partly (perhaps mostly) that we no longer knew who Phillip was, nor did it matter (cf. Pate & Kumm, 2017).

The friendly exchange aside, “jam sessions” is emblematic of play. Play is a give-and-take of gestures that not only suspend normative rules and functions but also, in that suspension, transport the players to “a different register of existence” (Massumi, 2014, p. 4). In this different register of existence, we can improvise and reinvent who “we want to be” and “how we should live” (Law, 2004, p. 10). In this different register of existence, the new becomes possible through the “surplus-value” (Massumi, 2014, p. 10) of play’s innate elasticity. This is equally emblematic of the playful friendship between us, which most often manifests in jamming, in playful remixes of ideas, borrowing from other modes, and playing over the other’s accompaniment, much like musicians in a tricky space of give-and-take.

Who Phillip-as-trickster is, or becoming, exceeds our dissertation projects. He periodically resurfaces in various voicemails, emails, and conversations between the two of us, inserting levity in moments of seriousness we experience in our lives beyond our dissertations. He made appearances in our conversations about this article, for example. So much so, we even contemplated including him as a third author. When attending to a particularly nebulous yet important concept like play, it is extremely difficult to be precise. We often invoked Phillip as a way to garner greater elasticity in our thinking about the concept, maneuvering through multiple iterations of this current version.

Our playful gestures in the name of Phillip not only induce play in the recipient of the gestures but also abduct us both into a different way of being. This is the critical importance of play. We still play with Phillip, as a bid for maneuverability among the anchors we variously find ourselves tethered to, as a way to reimagine how we want to be—through abduction to a different register of existence. Against the backdrop of seriousness in our research, one of us will play, offer a ludic gesture, and the other is drawn into another register to play out the drama differently. This is not always an intentional acting out, although, at times, it may be angst-driven. Rather, the experience is more or less like that of being stretched, like rubber bands, between two poles of our necessary anchors at one end and the exuberance of play at the other (Massumi, 2014), as a method for stretching forward, pulling back, or flicking the band to volley a problem into another register. In these ludic acts, we garner modest strength to carry on, drawing each other into a ludic logic that suspended the seriousness long enough to just take another step.

When the Going Gets Serious (or Weird), Go Gonzo

Throughout our serious endeavors in research, we have learned, much to Phillip’s credit, a ludic logic that embraces that which is often deemed anomalous, tenuously important, and perhaps even silly. As we were at pains to explain from the outset, this ludic logic recognizes play as a term of positive, inclusive value that “can very well include seriousness” (Huizinga, 1944/1949, p. 45). To use Massumi’s (2014) words, this ludic logic “does not recognize any rigid opposition between the frivolous and the serious” (p. 40). Likewise, this ludic logic recognizes the primacy of play—that its value, importance, and significance exist autonomously to other ends. Indeed, utility or instrumentality is actually a secondary parasitism upon play’s principal capacity for elasticity (Massumi, 2014). And this is important for research insofar as we might reimagine and enliven its possibilities through play.

As we have attempted to demonstrate, this ludic logic considers play a potential lifeline, buoy, and margin of maneuverability that can help us to engage methodology as a matter of how we want to be and live in the world. Thus, play is not always deep. As with Phillip, it is sometimes no deeper than surface-level mockery. In our own way, Phillip was an attempt to mock the anger we felt toward the straitjacketed procedures of research. And in his own way, Phillip continues to mock our overzealous seriousness. We welcome his mockery and find buoyancy among his “flicks,” “stretches,” and “pullbacks” along our tensions. We admire his “slack,” his attitude of indifference and inhibition, his willingness to say anything, especially at inopportune moments of seriousness. We take joy in the diversions and digressions he affords us. He accompanies us when we do not know where to go, when it all seems upside down, and when we feel disoriented in our endeavors. He allows us to be more acute and cute in our research stories, being both coy and bold in his tellings (Dewsbury, 2010).

Phillip is our trickster, our coyote (cf. Haraway, 1995; Young, Haas, & McGown, 2010), our Heyokah (Sams, 1990), taking us to our edges. He is our Pink Panther, painting the absurdity of his world a silly pink hue (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2011), reminding us that there is always already more to work/think/play than meets the eye. And we thank him. Setting these sweepingly playful descriptions aside momentarily, we want to devote our few remaining pages to discussing their significance in relation to a style of life, a way of being, and a register of existence that we believe all this talk of play, ludic logic, buoyancy, and maneuverability points to. We call this style, following Hunter S. Thompson (1971/1998), “Gonzo.”

To use Thompson’s words (1971/1998), “when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is… to relax . . . and move out with music at top volume” (p. 12). In context, Thompson was describing the necessary urgency of experimental aspects (Massumi, 2002) to his life and work, precisely because of their ambiguity:

Never lose sight of the primary responsibility. But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad. . . Do it now. Pure Gonzo. (Thompson 1971/1998, p. 12)

For us, the “weasels” that can close in when life gets complicated are much like the seriousness we have been countering with play throughout this article. And like Thompson, we as researchers cannot say with any certainty that we know what “the story” is, what the “primary responsibility” is, or “where [we would] end up when [we] began” (Massumi, 2002, p. 18).

Another iteration of how we conceptualize Gonzo is through Jim Henson’s imaginative invention of a Muppet by the same name, the strange character of inconclusive origins, coupling with chickens and blowing his trumpet inoppor-tune-ly. This Gonzo is also somewhat of a trickster, a disrupter of all things serious. He was a minor character, a counter to the seriousness of Kermit and the production-value of a program, disrupting that value and reminding us that the entire show is make-believe. The seriousness, whether of a television show, a frog, or research, is a majoritarian operation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2011). We need minor characters to loosen the major grip of seriousness upon our worlds. Gonzo is but one iteration of this minor disruption in a children’s program.

We know Gonzo in these ways, but the “Gonzo” we are suggesting is neither a Muppet caricature nor the Doctor of Journalism, nor even the hallucinations that may have given them rise. “Gonzo,” in our sense of the word, is a style—not of writing, nor of research—but of life. It is the lived embrace of the strange, peculiar, and even the profane or silly that both the Muppet and the journalist exhibited. It is the musical ride on difference (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/2011) that productively destroys seriousness whenever and wherever it ignores play.

We are both at the dawn of our careers, and we regret not having more stories to tell about how Phillip helps us play—about how he allows us to “Go Gonzo.” However, what is important about his appearances, as few as they may be, is the play he induced and continues to induce in us. In our work, we are going Gonzo, stretching and pulling back as rubber bands to “flick” at the academy. Profane? Silly? We volley to another register. But we take this seriously. This is the shift from product to process. The experimental aspect arises when our plans and designs are scuttled and we don’t know where we are going or where we will end up. It is the surface warfare against the deep abyss of seriousness that would drown out play. Gonzo: a life lived in spite of profound seriousness. Playfully. Importantly. Gonzo.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Brian E. Kumm is an assistant professor of recreation management at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. His scholarship concerns questions related to the ontological, ethical, and affective turns within emphasis given to matters of leisure, life, and culture. He is also committed to the ongoing thinking around postqualitative inquiry.

Joseph A. Pate is an assistant professor of outdoor leadership at Young Harris College. His scholarship endeavors to explore the complexities of lived-experiences in contexts of leisure, popular music, and the unfolding dynamics of contemporary culture. He is invested deeply in pedagogic pursuits as well as developments in qualitative inquiry.

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