Language and Play
Games, Criticism and Awe
Two hunched pairs of shoulders are working as exemplary hangers for mustard green and powder blue crew neck tees, one of them is sighing over an armistice situation with a large language monster. Stuck on a theorem for hours, with my coffee already cold, out of cigarettes, I decide to pay closer attention: this young man with scruffy, stringy hair is trying to convince mustard about Hegel’s influence on Nietzsche. Wastrel of youth I tell myself. Think of the laconic kid in your debate team, the man in blue is bullish on a teammate that lacks the only worthwhile attribute in that kid. The poor tired bot scrounges up characters till it has run out of ways to say no, eventually it cedes to the accumulating pressure from some dizzying data centre. Prodigiously reading at about 900 words per minute, blue tee blurts out something about the Hegelian reading of Nietzsche, to which the other guy agrees. These cannot be philosophy students, and their neurons have been in perpetual rest thanks to the infinite scribe they can glaze over, at this point I’m sure this is all some sort of ASMR to them. Even language itself.
Debate circuits have the same lacklustre grey film on them that surrounds those two guys, sans the complete and annihilating incompetence. Having spent some time frittering away on those podiums arguing about things I don’t care to remember, I am forced to admit these kids have mastered the art of bullshitting.
Most of us have spent an adequate time of our adulthood lukewarmly disliking debate kids, having been on both sides of this circus I’m still not sure what felt wrong about watching those Model UN arguments. I’ve always been at the peripheries, trying to ascertain how much of the void I can allow the notion of a truth value to fill; trying not to corrupt my sense of self, trying not to become a saint, I don’t know about sexton but can con-men(read artists) really be saints? The whole point seems to be intentional withdrawal of some self, why did Saul Bellow hate psychoanalysis after all.
I had more integrity, naivete or both a decade ago at fourteen; I despised some of these people crittering away at the spindle of truth. I would contort my words and treat debate rounds the same way I treated badminton, I had very little technique, after years of training I still held the racket incorrectly, just the way I hold my pen wrong. What I could do was smash away in anger, be so fast and aggressive that my opponents didn’t get a chance to show me their polished skills; unsurprisingly I didn’t go too far in the sport, but it was enough to boost my ego in middle school. Naturally, I applied the same strategy in arguments, it works; when your only goal is processing someone’s words faster than they can keep up with, they’re left finding needles in a haystack, your job is to drop needles, posturing carefulness, just enough to convince them that it’s an important needle to find, with enough restraint to ensure they know that the needles don’t even matter to you. I’d do this, as a freshman I’d win competitions against seniors in high school; I started getting bored, more importantly I started feeling dirty, and then there was the issue of integrity which I hadn’t yet learned how to dispose off in public the way you quietly hide gum behind a desk, slowly numbing your conscience, one sticky thing at a time.
Yet, something about those days stuck, despite my condescension I’ve recently been forced to see that I’m not too different from them, thanks to an eloquently written essay in the New Critic with a Socratic stance on the purpose of reading, writing and criticism. This kept rubbing me the wrong way no matter what. I’ve been averse to my own truth seeking tendencies. An unintentional consequence has been my amorphous dislike towards people who still strive for it earnestly, with no good conscience can I justify this. Their distance from disillusionment, or the fact that it might not even be on their horizon hurts me, it is after all a reminder that it is a personal failure, not a universal one; it’s not martyrdom, rather my inability to build castles sturdy enough to protect myself, the picket white fences didn’t keep the nightmares away.
Maybe the powder blue kid knew this, he did simultaneously manage to not care about an iota of knowledge, as well as have the will to garner it in every visible way, so he always has an answer. A man I would call capable of creating ornate decorative art. To redeem my own proclivities I’m forced to torture language till a difference erupts between me and him. He only cared about winning, check. His truths were puddles and not oceans because they only mattered insofar as their internal coherence was intact, in a sense he would be happy chanting tautologies; the point isn’t reaching anywhere, alright check again. Winning for him had nothing to do with style, grandeur or more crudely the manner you snatched it from someone else. Debate kids on the other hand work the same way as sporting leagues do, you’d never spot a nationally ranked player thumping his fist in the air after winning against a toddler; even wild predators sometimes forgo their food sometimes if it already looks dead. There’s no play.
Later I learned the value of this friction I call play, which I’ve found years later again in Henry James. Friction for the sake of it. Sometimes the way you see a stadium yelling and cheering when the game hasn’t even started, or if you’re on one of those dates not knowing what ball guys they’re playing and you look all confused like Katherine Hepburn in woman of the year; it didn’t matter there, nor does it now - that’s what the game is about right, the anxiety in the heads of those eleven or thirteen or whatever ghastly unlucky number of dudes chasing the ball, they care because of the yelling; or the atmosphere as they call it.
The reason writers used to move to New York, or the scene Babitz was always chasing, all she wanted was 1920s Paris. what are we all doing on Substack if not halfheartedly hoping we start a “scene”. and guess what those are built upon - friction. Not transparency, not the kind of transparency you give away to a reader, now there’s a few things I’ve had to tussle with here: 1. Does the scene matter 2. What is it? 3. Is it “good”. insofar as 1. is concerned, more great art has been produced out of these so called scenes, whether because of them or in spite of them, but somehow surrounding them, after all every artist needs something worthwhile to oppose. 2. It can’t exist in a state of opaqueness or transparency, it is checkered, it needs unfolding over and over again, only to be folded back in a specific weird way by everyone saying their own goodbye; as if the best minds of your generation are saying goodbye to this weird collared shirt, and unless you’re there you don’t know why it’s important to fold it. This situational context alone, not even taking into account the inexplicableness of every person’s own reasons for making certain folds without rules explicated to the point of art’s ruin - how can a singular truth value about anything exist there - even if this truth value was good - it’s paradoxical in the sense that a common utilitarian notion would find truth values efficient to build complex systems upon, but that only serves you as long as the systems are mere deductions based on what already exists, in which case, none of that is creation, just a hall of mirrors. a tautology. staring at the same singularity from different corners of your eye without calling it what it is. rendering us all jobless, so the true utilitarian position here would be to build castles that cannot be replicated in any order or situation, that really merely is circumstantial. The non-utilitarian position already defends my point sufficiently, as asking for a defense, is asking of art what it means to ask a girl to undress in front of your beer drinking friends.
In order to sound a little more coherent, I will confess: this essay is really about play, language games, as the title plainly states. I’ve meandered around how to justify this, as something worth writing about, as something someone should care about for a bit. I didn’t want it to become a personal essay, as Iris Murdoch says I need to distance myself from this piece of work for it to be true art in some sense (excuse my paraplegic paraphrasing). After a few weeks I realized I couldn’t write without looking pathetic or wanting; insofar as conveying something personal goes, or more importantly, the urge to convince someone of something. I doubt it is possible to write without manipulating the reader. There’s something about the reader-writer sanctity, this agreement - if you fool me beautifully you can rob me of my life’s lessons that’s alright, don’t think twice -that does make writing the same as being in love. I can’t know if I can convince anyone worth convincing, else they wouldn’t be in that set or category to begin with, it’s a task where you want to fail, but you want to watch yourself having a shot at winning. Absolute victory would be annihilating to a writer. Anyway, enough wippity wlop, curtain drop.
Play and Games
On an island of soil in the centre of a lawn, behind a grove of trees serving as prison door rods a white cat was rolling on its back. Presumptuously, it was looking at the same ceiling of stars as me, all held down by a twig. watching this being lay itself down to the universe at play with itself i couldn’t help agree with Huizinga: play is older than culture, animals have always known this survival reflex, this shimmer of consciousness, it sort of captures the spinning top side of the nausea very well, this feeling of touching the sharp end of an object rotating very fast, bristling touch, but touch, irregardless.
The immanence of play in language is unwavering. Language-games and criticism are determinations within it. My primary object of contention has and always will be language, irregardless of the cultural cadaver being ungracefully sewed over in some superimposition. Here, language will simply be an instrument in the hands of play during meaning-making, and similarly in the dissolution of calcified hindrances to this process that are rancid with familiarity. Before going any further, we must ascertain some functions of play, the “lifeless sleepiness of nature”1.
Now, when does play turn to a game, that cat stood still clutching the heartbeat of the universe with its seemingly interrupted play. when it suddenly noticed me infringing my consciousness upon its until now almost non existent self-consciousness. I didn’t know what quite happened, but now it started reacting, the cat was dirtied with the same consciousness of being watched that I claim destroys and creates my own humanity day in and out. That’s the game. Games cannot exist without voyeurism, literary games or games in the most literal sense, do we have a game that doesn’t track how to win, is there a game that you know of that exists for the love of the game? What is the love of the game if not tilting towards something desirable while being either observed, or giving you something that can be tangibly repurposed and narrated to another consciousness if you wish to. Before adventing into the relevance of language games, let us defend the relevance of play, and for that one must indefatigably justify the inexhaustible existence of it. False dichotomies have been constructed about play and seriousness, one can deny seriousness, but how does one deny play? It isn’t a part of pair categories or binaries. It is an inherent property of consciousness imposing itself upon the world and the sense of self within the world that it creates. Beyond opposition, what does seriousness tell us about play, this contrast leaves in the lurch with reality and its horrors. play is outside our explicable conceptions of wisdom and folly, which is why fun and frivolousness falls short of describing play. To me, play is sacred. Until the praise of folly by Erasmus, the middle ages continued creating a dichotomy between seriousness and folly, which was falsely snowballed to play and seriousness. This isn’t by any means against sincerity, in fact I would argue that sincerity is encompassed in play.
This is a call to return to the creative impulse of play, and circumscribe the limits we must place on morality which has a kind of vanity of rotten tenderness, vanity of not hardening. It wears a blasphemous pastiche, knuckles hardened with wars against mortar- but the cavities never fill up, always a quicksand puddle, one you keep trying to drown in. Yet, play doesn’t lend itself to definitions or the prison of language easily2.
Play precedes language, naturally makes a nod to the universe itself being at play with itself, it’s a pure time vampire, and “time is the echo of an axe within a wood”. Ludens argues that the essence of play is too big to be classified as will or mind, and too small to be boxed as instinct, it’s not the symbol of the thing the way literature is, it is the thing itself. There have been multiple theories about why play is important, looking at the sincerity of play with lenses of utilitarianism is a lost war, as it presupposes play serving which isn’t play. Here I would invoke Pyotr Pavlensky’s Subject Object art theory3, the purpose of art, which play constitutes a primordial ingredient of, is to make power (replace this with meaning, truth, morality, ethics and so on) its instrument instead of making art serve the thing, instead of making play serve the thing. How do we begin quantifying play when it’s not something we can ever be taught to achieve, something we are always reaching for, something that is usually just given to us - with its “mirth, tension and fun”. It resists interpretation, it is mimesis of the fundamental singularity that is near to the wild heart of life. There’s this weakness in my bones, all the time, the frustration of never being able to say everything I want to.
Chasing Good Criticism
You get to decide who to worship
- David Foster Wallace
Criticism is re-creation4 and recreation, a game in which the critic aims to create a world which can sufficiently enfold the complexities of the existing work, to wrestle this new dream world encompassing the work against reality. What games should a critic play? What are the rules, does it have to be a zero sum game with the piece of art being criticized, or with the reader5. Is it more important to ascertain superiority over the original creator, whether through praise that creates a world so intricate that their work is simply an adornation, or superiority over the reader where they are simply made to feel like they are being seen by New Yorkers and they are tourists wearing I <3 NY tshirts6.
This essay is partially in response to a recent piece in The New Critic, as well as a more broad tendency to impose value judgement in the form of supposed public good on literary criticism, where the said public good is difficult to catch or point at, and this lack of formalization does more harm than good. My claim is that when criticism becomes embarrassed by play, it begins to confuse clarity with virtue. Josie’s critique is less a verdict on Emre, but more a divulgence of what criticism is supposed to be, a complaint about inscrutable writing here isn’t just about style but it calls into question the purpose of writing and criticism. Here criticism is supposed to answer to demands of clarity and legibility to an imagined audience, this makes play evasive, style is under specious scrutiny, and diffculty becomes lack of depth or virtue. None of this indicates that we owe nothing to truth or readers, but that doesn’t comprise an exhaustive list of reasons to create any art. What sticks out like a sore thumb in that piece isn’t that it is necessarily wrong about the conclusions it reaches, but that these conclusions are obtained in laboratory conditions where play has been locked out of the room.
Josie’s critique of Merve Emre reveals a model of criticism where value judgement precedes style. In a demotic sense, rather than specific engagement with the Merve’s arguments, the piece dealt with Emre’s supposed misuse of her stylistic capabilities, both in her persona7 and words. What must criticism be for this kind of judgement to seem natural, it presupposes that criticism has a higher purpose than play, while I don’t deny the supposed purposes, play encompasses them all. I think of emre as someone who loves to play with language, enjoys its games, respects them.
One must distinguish between a literary critic and a public intellectual, those roles coincide, but who becomes a public intellectual is not so much a causal effect of good or bad criticism but a correlation that in the worst of times serves as the albatross around culture’s neck8. This piece operates in a framework where play cannot be recognized, in a less conflicting vein she correctly observed, “I suspect Emre enjoys thinking of literary type as a thing to be played with,” we only differ on the matter that I don’t suppose this to be a bad thing, play can be sincere. Josie wanted the critic to not think of themselves as someone on a pulpit who is above informing or assessing people’s tastes, but simultaneously argued for freeing aesthetic value from responsibility to the external world. There is no reason to enforce this separation from the side of the reader, and there is no way to guarantee this separation from the writer’s side, this is fundamentally in opposition to play, in opposition to poking at boundaries. It cannot be passive if it already entails entering another world. She asks if criticism is just discourse of one judgement opposed to another, or if it builds to something. While it sounds like a good question on a cursory glance, it assumes play isn’t constructive when implicating the same on criticism which is play-within play in language. The argument becomes ouroboros at best when later they call into question the epistemic grounds for evaluating attempts to communicate a judgment against each other. If answering affirmative, then literary criticism should become a sub field of analytic philosophy, if not - we have reality, criticism existing, or criticism being a thing that is valued, comes from axiomatically starting with the idea that the notion of “better” one seeks here is won through play, it’s a thing with life, not pure dry epistemology.
Finally, this model of criticism asks what is criticism, if not a systematic attempt to understand why a certain type of aesthetic object resonates with a certain group of people at a specific time? If it is inherently tilted towards culture than art or literary theory, then the so called constructivist attempts it would possibly be allowed to make would only feed into literature sieved through sociology, which is a rather extreme attack on individuality and creative expression in general. These are good but difficult questions that don’t serve either party in absence of dialectical back and forth. One cannot go on expecting answers here, at best someone can point out the tensions at stake. When Emre challenged the idea that criticism could create a knowledge claim, that had to do with our ability to squint our eyes at the boundaries between critics and writers, the moment a critic does more than rejuvenate the spirit of critically engaging with writing, they are transgressing into the writer’s room. The very thing she argues against “to not fall for critics because of their smart sounding tics” is something it falls prey to itself, this time appealing to morality for some reason. Intellectual polish seen with the hermeneutics of suspicion, leads up to a crude generalization that composure is a flaky substitute for rigour. Vice versa, awkwardness and hesitation are supposedly reliable indicators of earnestness. Ironically, Josie herself abuses stylistic cues to do the work of a real argumentative scaffolding. Understandably, speech that seems to have already passed through the eyes of three careful editors being thrown at you in real time elicits discomfort, but I would agree with Josie’s epigraph, to struggle with what we like is important, what’s even more important is struggling with this discomfort that is one of the easiest cognitive distortions. This critique is evasive as it keeps circling around Emre’s mannerisms as if the laurels rest on the atmosphere of her persona; this does not compensate for an argument that never germinates. It would obviously be incorrect to say the objective polished conclusion is immaterial but similarly the other alternative that the process doesn’t matter is incorrect too. Consider this sentence from Human, All Too Human with the hermeneutics of suspicion we are asked to employ against play9: “Most thinkers write badly because they communicate to us not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of their thoughts.” This is easy to conflate with an Apollonian attitude in Nietzsche, which isn’t the case here — it’s always Dionysian10. This is why theorem provers like Lean are not replacing mathematicians, nor are LLMs, simply verifying the epistemic status of a conjecture isn’t the point of a creative pursuit. People are indeed very interested in, and benefit from knowing how certain conclusions, gestures, and patterns are formed in a writer’s head. Communicating this in a way that isn’t dull is incredibly difficult. It would be more fruitful to criticize if they failed to do this well, rather than whether it should be done. What do I mean by well here? That’s a game for the critic to play again. This is a reductionist view of looking at the layers between a fuzzy thought being formed, followed by its initial gesticulation, then the struggle to articulate it, then the revelations that exist simply as a result of the struggle, which make referencing the struggle pertinent. The model of criticism in question shows a disavowal to romanticizing the process of arriving at a thought, there’s a confusion about the primacy of criticism - is it the objective argument, or the style that matters more. At times Emre is criticized for not showing how she reached these magical peaks and her polish is what makes one suspicious, other times she is criticized for making the process of her reaching these conclusions seem important (the dig about her liking readers who are in on the joke). Neither of these capture the real tension between style and value, the differentiation one needs is between good and bad bullshit11, should we settle for disambiguation then, even at the risk of pinching art’s jugular?
Seemingly inscrutable style is not inherently bad: paraphrasing Zadie Smith’s essay on Nabokov’s novels: they’re castles where you spend years roaming around the doors and finding new ones, and so many of the best writers demand this work.
Towards the end, Josie’s appeal to Adorno seems misplaced; if anything the text12 better supports the opposite claim: art and criticism do not owe the reader full transparency as that easily becomes a vehicle of banality, such an expectation is flattening and consumerist. It almost settles for defining criticism as utilitarian and not an individual creative pursuit that might have inexplicable benefits to society as all art does, acting as if readers are helpless sheep. Is it not a worthwhile endeavour to watch a good critic tear down some work of art even for the sake of it sometimes, and see if that art perseveres.
Which is why being the original writer is still the harder thing, you can’t answer back. You entrust your reader to create those answers for you, a critic can poke holes at that, this is why art is hard work (in this case only in a particular sense, that is if your goal is some sort of “truth” rather than pure style, either is fine). Why does criticism have to be seen through such utilitarian lenses, unless one considers criticism as outside of the creative arts this argument is baseless. Even if one does consider criticism as public service, I will begrudgingly run with that alright13, in this case, first we need to demarcate the outcomes expected of this public service. For simplicity I shall assume it has something to do with encouraging critical engagement with arts and literature, a very crude position indeed. Is it not possible for a critic to invite readers through their obfuscation? (cf notion of the other, a lot of Blanchot’s oeuvre). With this utilitarian goal, you cannot go back to stylistic and moral views of what art should accomplish. Even if the desires against obfuscation are reasonable, here morality is veiled as a demand for clarity, if it comes from a place of neutrality supposedly, arguing about some sort of inherent objective value, one enters this double bind where you let go of play. Demands for such clarity makes writing an exercise in vanity or aggression instead of a curious experiment. I don’t want to teach anyone or correct them, I want them to see aurochs and angels with me rather than argue for some impoverishment of the self in service of truth. Josie doesn’t take well to supposed obfuscation of meaning or value that can be propagated by errant stylistic tediousness in the name of erudition, this is fair, what isn’t fair is questioning an author’s integrity when you argue without speciousness that their point is simpler than it is. I would venture a guess that this is a common Goodreads review on thousands of books worth reading.
Critics are not necessarily public intellectuals. Some are yes, and that’s not up to them, readers make them so. All they do is function as a symbol for the taste of our time, or readers. As Didion said on morality, what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience. Should we not break open these doors of morality (I wouldn’t dare uplift them to the point of calling them ethics), should you not let in play? Who will defend play? If play is simply a vehicle for morality to practice nicer calligraphy, what are we left with?14
Something to do with Awe
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do, and as they have to do
- Gertrude Stein
Veering through a vertigo but for a bit I shall choose my metric of “good art” no matter whether we pretend we have one or not, I understand we all have grand subjective nuanced relationships and theses of comparative literature every time we see a Substack post, still stick with me here. All of that can simply be classified as an extrinsically15 defined metric, this should hopefully work as a metric you can formalize in the space of what you are working on “as in as a critic viewing a certain kind of art with certain desires, and proclivities you choose and some quantification rules” or intrinsic as in “all this happens in your brain simply in a randomized function you don’t understand which also once in a while leads to some cool ideas coming out of it like a radioactive emission shot out of a stable pile of atoms after five years. This very thing, I argue, can be recreated with the flat extrinsic scale too. In fact it wouldn’t lose the magic of the stochasticity, but we would have better approximation functions to it, and bounds to what the stochasticity can do, the rest are levers in our system and so on. Now, what would happen if I were to choose an extrinsic metric, there’s a lot of obstructions but I should only like to address one here: there’s always this corrupting sale, the creator selling some emotional trigger either cleverly hidden somewhere or very out there, but thanks to your own big monkey brain there’s a reaction. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think enjoying art makes it less meaningful, or emotions are bad. I’m simply worried about transience. I don’t think being attacked with a big boulder of any emotion in a three hour hallucination created by someone else in their own reality will necessarily stick, if that is all there is. Now my second proposition. I think I would feel the integrity of an artist much more if they could somehow create this vacuum between me and their medium wherein no sales or bids can seep in. Of course there’s ties between art and anthropology, after all it’s for humans and so on and on. It’s still a craft, and some of its fundamental functions for me are: an acute awareness of being myself and feeling a little rearranged, but not having anything added or removed; simply a thin cast on my solitude, to further shelter it.
Good art should be able to cyclically, sustainably justify itself, without the aid of tallying toil or ethics. Think of architecture. Would you like it if they told you architecture is worth pursuing in a certain way because, “oh twenty thousand people worked so hard on this long, penile building in the middle of Manhattan”. Similarly, a beautiful carving simply should not be saying “don’t carve beautiful things because slavery was involved!”. Ethics, I don’t quite know where to reconcile those with art I guess. All of it, muddies art. The emotional “sale” between the artist and consumer is an ethical problem that informs taste or really distorts any measure or system you could create. That’s not an instability this system can take. It’s a fragile house of cards, a house I like, one that doesn’t keep me lonely.
“You can’t tie a thread around a mosquito”16 I announced it to my sister at about 4:15am lying exhausted in a hotel room . I had been trying to finish this piece, I wanted to write about language and play while being outside of it, hoping to write something that would communicate my awe about all this without giving away anything, without poking needles into canker sores on my heart. If I was a good writer I should be able to have my cake and eat it too, I should be able to bullshit17. I was convinced I could do what fiction lets you do in non-fiction. I’ve had the big-profound-life-changing-religious feelings about literature and writing and my intellectual pursuits and I’ve reveled in the conversation about mosquitoes and Gilmore Girls and Kafka18 with my sister at the break of dawn in a hotel room after ordering in long islands and spending hours diligently collecting papers in my Zotero hoping this time i would fix my issues with language (which is anyhow simply a record of saturated attention). I could convince people of whatever I want without giving away anything about myself, the dry approach i picked started to to feel like rubbing my palms on a shirt that had been left out when maintenance comes to change drywall boards, there’s fine chalk dust like sensory overwhelm all over it i can’t see it or wash it, it seeps into the other clothes. It feels like washing your hair with bar soap or hard water.
I am convinced mosquitoes are very important to this essay. Why can’t I criticize them? I can hate them but I can’t criticize them; they’re doing what they’re meant to with diligence I can only aspire to when working on my papers. Josie felt slighted by this seeming back and forth of Emre knowing or assuming hence expecting and thereby enforcing as she is the arbiter of taste or something, that her readers are in on her jokes. This was considered a bad thing, I wonder if it is possible for a critic to ever step outside of that entirely. I don’t quite think it is possible to do more than grapple, or play with these tensions, pointing to these vicissitudes and clarifying their ragged edges is the best language lets us do, it is not my place to make righteous claims. You rarely see a highbrow critic go write an in depth expose on why a Colleen Hoover novel is bad, sure cultural criticism about their readers, but not about the writing itself right? I must simply pay attention and quiver in the fullness of play when I can, I think we must try to know certain things only delicately19.
Play is the shimmer of the unexpressed; non-decorative20 play, insofar as it is non-ideological and non-moralistic and creates a wider sphere for games. Awe cannot be decorative21, when it is simply refining, akin to sharpening a knife so as to be useful; this isn’t a faithful way to reproduce awe frequently enough. Awe is inexplicable within time’s tunnels but it lends itself to simplicity in the eternal. Finally, we still don’t know much about awe it forms white patches on partings parted black22.
I know a thing or two about its absence though, it’s very similar to descriptions of urban loneliness, but it’s an entirely different beast. Imagine this monochrome street, that’s empty, it has this ancient - truth preserved across centuries kind of an oldness to it (very sepia but not in a soft shade manner in my eyes). character, but not life stitched to it. and the particular emotional response that this image evokes? (for me it often happens say in a mundane living room evening sometime around 7pm when the sun has set but it’s not night night and it’s all just — falling — and there’s all this chatter - and you’re forced to feel the slowness of time - of life happening slowly - of the texture of time itself. It’s not philosophical at all I promise, it’s just very painful and I simply feel compelled to tell about it - as if I saw a ghost and I’m scared I won’t be able to convince anybody of it - my desperation makes the prophesied thing truer.) anyhow, this particular image - it’s the antithesis (sometimes that’s all you have to describe things - sometimes not death are the best two words to sum up life) - of this feeling of weight of life washing you away - the awe when you look up at the stars - but take away the awe, take away the stars, take away the whole sky - just a big cavity that’s folding in on itself - it’s eating itself up, at an alarming rate, all you can do is sit and watch this violent, desperate, even repulsive act happen. All it evokes is genuine horror. I feel a shudder run down my spine. What do you do about this cavity? Do you invite other people in? Is that cruel, assuming non-existence of guilt - it still feels as if - even other people might stretch the hammock of this cavity? What do you do? you still run wild through poppy fields and let the hammock break.
Play has become fully itself in Awe, ludi est vita ipsa23.
PS - Thanks to Theodore Gary for the patient rounds of useful feedback
A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov, 1840
No other modern language known to me has the exact equivalent of the English “fun”. The Dutch “aardigkeit” perhaps comes nearest to it (derived from “aard” which means the same as “Art” and “Wesen” in German, and thus evidence, perhaps, that the matter cannot be reduced further). We may note in passing that “fun” in its current usage is of rather recent origin. French, oddly enough, has no corresponding term at all ; German half makes up for it by “Spass” and “Witz” together. Nevertheless it is precisely this fun element that characterizes the essence of play.” Huizinga, 1950
Power is merely a phenomenon to him, and we use Pavlensky’s framework of defense for political art, where instruments designed to gain power begin to work for the invisible, revealing it - instead of having the invisible work for an existing power.
We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.
I stopped talking about mosquitoes for a bit (see footnote 16)
After great theorizing things finally feel fresh, at this moment I made the startling discovery that was first witnessed by my sister: “aw i have thought. i no isheep, I thought Socrates wasn’t real.”
“Foundations of the new morality, it prescribes that both art and personal life must become political means, they form a single bundle - like a bundle twigs. It looks steady but burns fast.” - Pavlensky
This is similar to the differentiation between events and actions in Pavlensky’s work - “it manifests in the fact that the existence of an event as such depends on its consequences. the artist does not create an event. it would be too presumptuous of them to think they are capable of that. the artist can only create circumstances. and it is the consequences of these circumstances that create an event. what circumstances resemble most is a vortex”
Naturally this is not just about models of criticism, but the cascading beliefs about art, taste makers, and so on and so forth
Perhaps my essay should have been titled In Defense of Dionysus in Language.
On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt misses the distinction between good and bad bullshit.
”Gaps. - The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, thus enabling every reader to follow the process through and, where possible - in the academic industry - to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. For the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. It is objectively devalued as this distance is reduced; the more it approximates to the preexisting standard, the further its antithetical function is diminished, and only in this, in its manifest relation to its opposite, not in its isolated existence, are the claims of thought founded. Texts which anxiously undertake to record every step without omission inevitably succumb to banality, and to a monotony related not only to the tension induced in the reader, but to their own substance. Simmel’s writings, for example, are all vitiated by the incompatibility of their out-of-the-ordinary subject matter with its painfully lucid treatment. They show the recondite to be the true complement of mediocrity, which Simmel wrongly believed Goethe’s secret. But quite apart from this, the demand for intellectual honesty is itself dishonest. Even if we were for once to comply with the questionable directive that the exposition should exactly reproduce the process of thought, this process would be no more a discursive progression from stage to stage than, conversely, knowledge falls from Heaven. Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience. Of this the Cartesian rule that we must address ourselves only to objects, ‘to gain clear and indubitable knowledge of which” - Adorno
I would prefer to side with the romantics here naturally, “nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly”
This is all to say, one doesn’t know if Euthydemus and Dionysodorus weren’t in it for the love of the game, maybe the sophists were onto something, maybe we don’t have to blindly follow Socrates and spoon feed hemlock to art that doesn’t fit the bill. Also, a reminder that earnest bullshit can be alright, and don’t read Harry Frankfurt’s “on bullshit” , it’s alright if my life’s calling is setting fires. Perhaps you might argue that being the devil’s advocate, savoir faire without sound discernment is the epitome of acquiescence for the saloon in hand. A bind really, how to leave? One must remember play encompasses sincerity, Dionysian rather than Hermesian
If something has an intrinsic property, then so does any perfect duplicate of that thing; whereas duplicates situated in different surroundings will differ in their extrinsic properties.” - David Lewis
We had a belaboring conversation about mosquitoes, one had sneaked into the room when I opened the porch door for a smoke; she was looking up how technically it was possible to be blinded if a mosquito bit your eyelid somehow, or so Gemini told her red eyes. After some more intellectual spasms in the conversation this happened: “I feel like i’m gonna slap you w your excellent intuition did you see that coming” “i don’t see how that would help with my writing” “i don’t see how it would hinder it” “Would it be Play?” *slap* *It was Play.*
”bullshit is a play generator” “someday we will patent that the genesis of play is bullshit” Another profound realization we had after I went into great details describing how if instead of blinding us I breathed in the mosquito, were our lungs capable of decomposing it. would we need antibiotics, what antibiotics would decompose it, we’re full of bacteria anyway, human cells only make up 43 percent of the body. I was asked to give her credit for this conversation else I would be taken to the intellectual small claims court. My impossible way such that the reader-writer sanctity wouldn’t matter, demanded that this wouldn’t be art, I was trying to sit and stitch mannequins to burn.
We were wondering if my mosquito was like the roach gregor samsa, at this point she was convinced I was oversimplifying kafka. “So i’ve read letters to felice and letters to milena, no letters to [insert sister’s name], where has Kafka been revealing all this to you” “all those were PR stunts what me and franz have is too special to be publicized” *bzzzz* slaps arm
Recalling making a cranberry tiramisu and dunking ladyfingers in cranberry syrup, immersing but not dissolving
“Decorative art is the type of art that serves ideology. It doesn’t matter what kind of ideology: red, black, white, green, brown, or starred-and-striped. What matters here is that here, the role and function of art are reduced to a decoration. [...] ideas inspire human minds and decorative art eagerly offers its services [...] to express them in forms capable of touching every heart and mind- forms that would leave no one cold. This art is busy decorating the shop sign” - subject-object art theory, Pyotr Pavlensky, 2025
Against decorative art, but not quite towards political art. Art that is surreptitiously rendered senseless by beauty instead. Note that this can be perceived as something advocating for morality, but decoration fundamentally takes art to a realm that is unable to achieve transcendence and exuberance, which is only reserved for poets and saints, not the sort of moderation liberals seek when they demand transparency and anything except beauty, or horror from art. ( cf Henry James is actually primarily a horror writer)
From Letters to Vera, Nabokov paraphrasing Mikhail Lermontov.
Don’t bother hunting this down, it’s made up
The best thing I've ever read on substack.