play research group

Michelle has asked me to post this comment:

I think its possible to put Benjamin's quote in historical context - to see this practice (of inculcating habit through play - rhymes and so on) as emerging with the development of formal education for very young children in the form of Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten. [A reference for this might be Joachim Liebschner, "A Child's Work: Freedom and Guidance in Froebel's Educational Theory and Practice", Lutterworth Press 1992}

Froebelian education connects with Benjamin's approach in another way too - to do with the way that it conceives of the child's relationship to the world of things. Benjamin's theory of experience is anti-Kantian because it rejects the subject-object dualism in Kant. In early writings Benjamin speaks of animistic (I think) relationships with the world of things, and later, his theory of aura echoes this: ³To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return²
(Benjamin, 1939, 148)

I don't think I can stitch all this together here, but the issue of mimesis seems central too. In my work at the moment I'm trying to find ways to clarify the distinctions between mimesis, and illusionism. Though I haven't discussed it - both involve habit and repetitive action. Froebelian education seems to be about providing structures and material (that's the guidance bit in Liebschner's book) within which improvisational and mimetic play can take place, with non-determinable outcomes. I guess an opposing model of education would be B.F. Skinner with his lever-pressing rats, where structure determines response in a cybernetic feedback loop. In both, habit (/everyday routine) plays an important role, but in different ways. For Benjamin (and I'm thinking of his writing on collecting) the child's capacity to make imaginary worlds from everyday things has something utopian about it - this is mimetic but anti-illusionistic. I'm still struggling with this stuff - so I hope it makes some sense!

Ben offers the following quotes (from an essay on expanded cinema he's working on):

"For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit. Eating, sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be installed into the struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery rhymes. Habit enters life as a game, and in habit, even in its most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end. Habits are the forms of our first happiness and our first horror that have congealed and become deformed to the point of being unrecognizable".

Walter Benjamin, 'Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work' (1928), in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927-1934, Cambridge, Mass. and London, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 101 - first published in Frankfurter Zeitung, in March 1928.

Incidentally that same year Benjamin's friend Kracauer writes in the same newspaper a description of a roller coaster ride which is also interesting in terms of play:

"Primitive instincts force the scream out. These instincts, usually suffocated by the solid construction of things, are released by the solid confusion of the external, by the entwinement of façade and wood scaffolding. The insane tempo awakens them completely and now they are playing at insurrection. The car passengers scream out of the fear of being smashed to bits, they are horrified at the edge of the world; the picture of danger puts them into terror. Their screaming is elementary.

But it is also something else. It is also the scream of bliss at being able to drive through a New York whose permanence has been suspended, that is no longer able to be threatening".

Siegfried Kracauer, 'Roller Coaster', Qui Parle, vol 5, no. 2, 1992, 59. Originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 July, 1928