For Every to There Is a fro

To-and-fro, The Rhythmic Elements Implicit in Play

Fortunately, play’s ambiguity is also what opens it up to interpretation. Ambiguity is not simply indeterminacy or chaos but literally names the double (ambi-) action (-agere) where meaning pulls in two different directions, a structure of “to-and-fro” that even Huizinga needs to import into the irreducibility of play (p. 32). If play is ambiguous, it is also an enacted ambiguity, and its back and forth creates a core of pattern, tension, and embodiment that can be developed. At various points, Huizinga (1938/1955) suggests a connection between play and rhythm, arguing that “[i]n play the beauty of the human body in motion reaches its zenith … saturated with rhythm and harmony” and he goes so far as to put play at the basis of rhythm in both poetry and music (p. 10). The rhythmic element of play for Huizinga seems to depend on what we might call its strophic form of repetition. He claims that from its inception play is always already on its way to being repeatable and thus codified as game. Corresponding to this repetition of “play as a whole,” and making it possible, is a more minute repetition within its “inner structure,” by which Huizinga means the timing of a move, the recurring choice of actions, and the alternation of turn taking (p. 10). Huizinga uses an odd mixture of musical and weaving metaphors to describe this: “[i]n nearly all the higher forms of play the elements of repetition and alternation (as in the refrain), are like the warp and woof of a fabric” (p. 10). Further, of the multiple ways Huizinga approaches play, the rhythmic body is the only one that also applies to the “irreducible quality of pure playfulness” in children and animals (p. 7).

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/2004), in Truth and Method, builds off of Huizinga’s work to develop a “medial” sense of play by collecting and radicalizing the diverse metaphors of play. For Gadamer, the “talk of the play of light, the play of waves, the play of gears or parts of machinery, the interplay of limbs, [and] the play of forces” reveal that we unconsciously conceive play as any “to-and-fro movement which is not tied to any goal which would bring it to an end” (pp. 104–105). Gadamer’s trust in the truth of language thus leads to a sense of play divorced from human subjectivity, indeed from any particular agent as player, and posits playing as a motion that takes place between things. It is the betweenness of the infinitive “to play” or the gerund “playing” that is at stake in the “medial” sense of play. Gadamer, like Huizinga, uses the metaphor of a “refrain” to describe play’s form, and we should take the to-and-fro movement as the most pared down elements of a rhythm (p. 105). His advance over Huizinga is twofold. First the to-and-fro introduces a sense of interruption and reversal that makes rhythm internal to play rather than merely an observed feature of it. Second, rhythm emerges from the interaction of all the parts, so that it is newly created by the waves or players and does not exist prior to the unfolding of play. Taken together, these traits establish some form of inherent relation between play and rhythm. Gadamer, however, does not delve into the phenomenology of rhythm to distinguish various relations between “to” and “fro.”

For both Huizinga and Gadamer, it is the rhythmic element that opens up an intermediate sense of playing as a process prior to, or beyond, the ordinary human world with nonhuman actors. So it is not surprising that the ethological study of animal behavior has developed a similar methodology to research play. Equally, I turn to animal play, rather than the phenomenology of sport, in order to avoid using games as models for play. Here too play has been difficult to define abstractly, but this has not stopped researchers from cataloging and studying a range of playful acts which are drawn from other behavior patterns, which are ordered into new sequences, and which leave off before a culminating act (Byers & Bekoff, 1981; Fagen, 1981). Play fighting, for example, might include chases drawn from a flight response and conclude without any serious blows. In a recent review of play behavior definitions, Gordon Burghardt (2005) summarizes these criteria for recognizing play: “it differs from the ‘serious’ performance of ethotypic behavior structurally or temporally in at least one respect: it is incomplete (generally through inhibited or dropped final elements), exaggerated, awkward, or precocious; or it involves behavior patterns with modified form, sequencing, or targeting” (p. 74). Burghardt adds that, of several other criteria which define the general conditions under which play occurs, this is the only one that tells us what play itself looks like (p. 73). In practice, this approach has generated fine-grained distinction between kinds of play and how play develops over time by looking at gestural repertoires, such as the choreographic notation of rat play postures that Burghardt describes.

This summary establishes the implicit role of rhythm in play ethology and gives a glimpse of how Huizinga’s and Gadamer’s theories can be practiced. Specifically, the ideas of both altered sequences of behavior and missing final elements call attention to a back and forth of actions, deviation from an expected order, and from an anticipated end. If these categories are meant to be more than external descriptions, then they suppose something like a rhythm specific to play. For example, culminating acts get their sense by following a sequence and ending it, being able to separate and exclude these acts as a category implies a combinatorial understanding of action. The approach has a general applicability, not only to games that recombine movements but also to the invented motions of sports, or the fine-grained tapping at buttons. The important thing is to recognize sequences of gestures and their internal tensions. The patterning of these actions takes place on top of the rules and mechanics that make up a game, using their regularity or surprise, and combining their procedural rhetoric in ways that begin to account for the notion of style.

The Phenomenology of Rhythmic Play

An affinity between play, rhythm, and gesture visible in the game of “Oliver Twist” is reenforced then by at least some theories of play. Gesture not only offers an account of the repetition internal to play that Huizinga demands but also a set of bodily possibilities, or “I can … ” gestures that link play to the affordances offered by games. However, the connection remains implicit within animal studies, where the majority of the species that play cannot be said to recognize rhythm as it is traditionally understood. Following Gadamer’s phenomenology of playing, we need a properly phenomenological concept of rhythm as a manner of relating to the world and embodying a style of play. I turn then to the phenomenology of rhythm developed by Nicolas Abraham (1952/1995b), which offers a rich formal framework and makes a unique argument for the connection between gestures and timing.

At the core of Abraham’s theory is a contrast between the measurable regularity of the objective world and the lived experience of rhythm. He illuminates the distinction by drawing attention to the fact that “the ticking of a clock, the coming and going of the waves, the beating of the heart are not rhythms, but … they can become rhythms without the slightest objective modification” (Abraham, 1952/1995, p. 67). Rather than being something special in the sight or sound of an object, or a mere fantasy of the subject, rhythm comes from a changed relationship between the two. The kind of act that relates a being to its world, what phenomenologists call an act’s intentional structure, also determines the way objects can enter into relation. An ocean wave grasped aesthetically, although the same object, has different possibilities than the wave grasped as something to swim within, and different again from a rhythmic wave. For Abraham, the formal analysis of music, the experiments of psychology, or indeed the study of rhythms in animal play, while informative, always miss this crucial element.

Abraham sharpens the contrast by comparing the experience of rhythm to a closely related state, the hypothetical expectation of recurrence. Suppose, for example, I guess that there will be a commercial break coming or that the pothole I am driving toward will bang just now. These guesses share many characteristics with rhythm: Both are informed by past repetitions, both include a sense of expectation, and both include a moment of comparison with the actual event. In the hypothetical mood, one notices a certain regularity and makes a prediction that is either confirmed or disproved. In contrast, rhythm understands itself as the creative force behind this recurrence, and so Abraham (1952/1995) argues that it neither “observes nor predicts” (p. 70). If a beat fails to appear at the expected time, it does not disprove the rhythm, but rather forces a reordering of the series of previous beats to make a new pattern of the whole. Rhythm transforms and appropriates a repetition in the world, making itself the author, and abstracting the pattern from any real referent. Only because it does so can the train’s rhythmic clacking continue as a beat in my head or fingers once the train has stopped. This is a fragile and illusory creativity, whose whole content comes from the real world. Rhythm holds a different relationship to failure, whereas a hypothesis is always open to revision, the rhythmic consciousness that cannot rearrange itself into a coherent pattern simply brings the rhythm to an end.

The distinction that Abraham draws between periodicity and rhythm already opens up the field of what we can consider as rhythmic by focusing on the temporality rather than the object’s intervals or meter. Rhythm appears as a way of synthesizing a past (rhythmic pattern), a present (confirmation or surprise), and a future (expectation). Separated from its material component, we can imagine a pattern jumping between the sound of a windshield wiper and blinking of a traffic light. Indeed, for Abraham, rhythm is at the origin of all temporal experience and the appropriation of external patterns provides diverse ways of ordering our lives in time. Gesture occupies a privileged place in this temporal structure because it is one threshold between what is under our control and what escapes us. As such, gesture allows the creative appropriation of experienced rhythm.

The question for Abraham is how the movement from an anticipation of recurrence to rhythmizing anticipation takes place, or how I come to possess a rhythm that initially comes from the outside. His answer is to use one’s body “[b]y making myself a rhythmic object. And so I have it because I am it” (Abraham, 1952/1995, p. 75). What would otherwise appear to be an innocuous habit, drumming one’s fingers or tapping one’s foot, is reinterpreted here as a fundamental way of embedding a self in time. Reading Abraham, the body begins to feel like so many ways of inhabiting the musicality of one’s own stride, of grinding one’s jaw, of passing time with nervous scratching. The short circuit relies on the transitional or medial space of gesture which is both part of my body but also responding to an alien force, and thus both what I am and something I have. Rhythmizing consciousness creates, but rhythms are held and maintained in the body. On one hand, this imposition of an alien rhythm has a disciplinary effect, reshaping my body and habits in what Henri Lefebvre (2004) refers to as “dressage.” On the other hand, in the distance between the passive experience of an external repetition and its active repetition in my hand or foot, there opens a space for kinaesthetic reflexivity and thinking with the body. Gestures become a medium for both rhythm and reflexivity, not only creating a sense of agency but also projecting my body as that way of inhabiting time and opening temporality to view (Abraham, 1952/1995; Noland, 2009).

At the core of this theory of rhythm is its creative capacity to carry on a beat even after the initial stimulus is gone. The train stops, but I keep hearing its clacking or have a feeling of where caught ball would have bounced in decreasing arcs across a playground. Initially only a retention of a pattern, the rhythmizing consciousness can now treat itself as the author of the beat, carrying it on or altering it. For Abraham, this creativity is also exploratory, because it allows me to grasp “modes of recurrence as corresponding within me to essential structures of temporality” (p. 77). We discover through it some of the possible temporal arrangements that we are capable of, and if the conditions for such a temporal synthesis are absent, if we are incapable, the rhythm disappears. With this, we can make the concept of play style more concrete: It is not just any selection of play acts, but one that attests to the quality of time for the player. Abraham (1952/1995b) himself draws attention to the playful dimension of this experimentation upon a structure, calling it the “inexhaustible temporal play of rhythmizing consciousness” (p. 78). Let us step back from Abraham for a moment and take stock of the connection between rhythm and play. Rhythm’s need to improvise a rule that synthesizes its past to accommodate the present beat speaks to play’s kind of freedom and makes it concrete. Play is a capacity to hold together a series of movements in time. Moreover, the presence or absence of play in its ghostly undecidability might stem from some impossible combination within play, like a rhythm that falls flat, and not from an external violation of play’s supposed autonomy and freedom. My suggestion here is that what play plays with, its ultimate object, is time.

How to Play With Time

We should dwell on how strange it is to try and play with time. “Temporal play” means that time has become manipulable and that it has been put at stake. Play crosses an ontological threshold between beings such as sand, toys, or balls to being as such. It might be useful to enumerate some other ways of playing in time and thus reveal what it means to play with time. Jesper Juul (2005) identifies three levels of time in games: play time, event time, and narrated time. Narration can be playful with the way events are recounted, as in postmodern literature or film, with flashbacks, circular endings, impossible time lines, and a whole host of other devices. Similarly, the event time of the game, its periods and halftimes, shot clocks, and turn order can be switched, shortened, or eliminated to experiment with new forms of game.

Both these forms of play still take place within a governing time that parcels out moments of narration or action, and which brings players together into a shared world. We could call this the attunement or atmosphere of play, in which time becomes startlingly fluid and ephemeral, where the moment both dilates and speeds up. The rhythms of this play time are those that initially come from outside, that discipline bodies and that Marxist critics such as Franco Berardi (2009) and Henri Lefebvre (2004) identify with an intensification under capitalism. We could also see this kind of time in a longer trajectory of regimented working days and leisure time in the tradition of Thompson (1967). In each case, time is playing with us.

To play with time involves all of these phenomena but also goes a step further. Time would no longer be a process that determines our being but would itself become through the determinations given in play. Of course, the main sense of this agency over time is illusory; it depends on the blind assumption that the rhythms of play can be kept going, and that we will not drop the ball. And yet the illusion itself is productive, differentiating agency and passivity in relation to rhythm by playing with and inventing the conditions for a possible synthesis. Playing comes before and between the split into subject and object, active and passive. In this reading, play elaborates time, multiplies temporalities, and uses the body to capture these times into a repertoire of gestures and rhythms. A play style is, therefore, never something given and set, but a map for exploring the qualities of time.

If we search for a concrete example at this abstract intersection of agency, time, the body, and play, the gesture of throwing reappears as a strangely paradigmatic for phenomenology. To recall only one example, we can look at Iris Young’s (1980) treatment of agency and the body in her feminist rereading of Erwin Straus’ (1966) study of gendered ways of throwing. Young shows that a set of spatial practices, including a closed or enclosed posture, a constriction of the limb’s full reach or stride, and a hesitancy or uncertainty about one’s capacities, derive from patriarchal interference in the development of a body schema. The social structures around play undermine, along gendered lines, one’s ability to comport one’s body in space and time. Throwing becomes a barometer for the social and psychological conditions of becoming an agent. What I have been calling play style is an attempt to generalize on Young’s insight and account for range of ways the experience of time can be constructed through play.

In “Oliver Twist,” everything is contained and set forth in the initial bounce. At the moment of release, it is already clear whether the throw was a good one or not, how much time before it falls back, and where it will land. The rhythm is a fragile one, which only looks forward to a confirmation and completion in my catch. There is no other person to interrupt my throw, to introduce a surprising pause, or a strange direction, and to whom I could give over control. No, a dropped ball will only trail off in slow arcs. Extending my arm out and down, using my shoulder as an accelerating fulcrum, and maintaining the precise timing at which to release my grasp are the core elements of the game. A tension is visible here between the exuberance of the one gesture and the minuteness of the other. It is almost as if my limb itself was thrown, it moves out to its limit and beyond my capacity to react. In contrast, releasing my grip on the ball is hardly a movement at all. Yet both gestures, at two extremes of motion, signify release, loss, escape, and giving.

In this brief phenomenological vignette, something like a play style appears. A structure, a set of motions that are not personal to me, cut across me in order to test if I can play with time, to test if I can sustain the double gesture of release that it takes to throw a ball.