Playing and Reality:
Catherine Liu

Why is it so hard for people to find their way to a shared reality these days? I will try to answer this question obliquely, with the question in the back of my mind about the hyperdevelopment of technocratic and liberal ideologies of domination (AI, trauma culture, etc) with another question: why is the artist and her process important to an account of what has broken down in the development of the political subject and the artist? The maturity of the artist is dependent on her ability to engage with purposeless purposiveness and the cultivation of creativity and “total living” that is dependent on environmental provision. Mass human thriving through creative engagement with a shared world is not something that capitalism wants to see realized. Art and creativity are entirely reified as objects and processes. The artist caught between lumpen bohemianism and entrepreneurial hustle provides us with a peculiar example of thwarted individualism. We are not ready to become political subjects: that is why we embraced the professionally-managed identity categories as our own.

As cultural workers, we should raise our expectations about the language we use to talk about art, beauty, work, process, and form. According to labor organizer Jane McAlevey, raising expectations was so important to union organizing: we are so far away from having artists’ unions, but we can begin to throw off the weighted blanket of resignation under which we have been hiding in order to ask more of ourselves and each other. It is so sad to be a witness to the complete and utter reduction of the terms of play, creativity, and destruction, concepts as critical to children and artists as to Silicon Valley instrumentalities. It is also deplorable that we on the Left—because of the liberal capture of arts institutions—have been so remiss in mounting a defense of art and aesthetic experience. Critical theory itself became a part of the culture industry, mined for prestige, profits, and circulation by allegedly not-for-profit organizations like Universities and University Presses. The French Theory and post-modernism during decades of deindustrialization has made art harder to practice and to write or talk about because there has to be a performance of specialization and mastery that is always exceeding ordinary language: innovation rather than communication dominates the critical theory space as much as any other part of the culture industry. It is not an accident then that “critical fill-in-the-blank” participated in the full reification of thinking and doing as modes of feeling and compliance, identity politics and its formation of critique as anti-bias training, and the shallowest forms of identitarianism has only left donors holding a winning hand. The professionalization of art practice has made MFA programs powerful credentialing mechanisms and allowed for a small group of tenured artists to find institutional shelter from the anxieties of the art market, but art itself has been delivered to the billionaire class on a biomorphic silver platter. 

On the one hand, in universities, we saw at the dawn of the 21st century the emergence of stupid acronyms like STEAM (adapted from STEM, science, technology, engineering, math) that tried to fit arts education into the world of applied scientific research, with for a moment avant-garde artists aping science and technology “researchers” in allegedly playful laboratory setups. On the other hand we have the proliferation of “experiences” like the “The Van Gogh Experience” or “Inside Matisse: the New Immersive Exhibition.” As pseudo-populist spectacle, these technologically virtuosic installations are parasitic on the work of two painters whose work represents different apprehensions of modernity and modern vision. The Van Gogh “experience” implies that we all need more of an experience than just a Van Gogh painting, we need to be surrounded by spectacles of projection, pixelation, simulation and surround sound in order to really “enjoy” the Dutch painter’s art. I’m sure there will be an AI Van Gogh replicant occupying his bedroom, looking out his window, because as Walter Benjamin already understood 100 years ago, technology wants us to believe that images can be brought within reach, piped directly into our minds, or miniaturized or exploded into our sensoria with minimal effort on the part of the viewer. Aesthetic experience conveyed in this way does not in fact make people more curious or tolerant of artists or art making. It makes people more anesthetized, more stupid about relating to other people or art objects in a field not fully saturated by technology or ideology. For my entire career in academia, it was forbidden to criticize popular technological culture industry objects in this way because we would be called elitist and that was worse than being a capitalist like Ross Perot or Donald Trump who had preserved with utter integrity the taste habits of consumption of your average person. This cultural populism was a poor substitute for political solidarity and yet it has reigned supreme in the halls of academe for my entire professional career. It’s time to break with compliance regarding the degradation of aesthetic experience and the critical language and discourse around art that has become ahistorical, obscurantist and reactionary, and profoundly anti-humanist as a matter of radical style. Think Object Oriented Ontologies. The title of this talk is an homage to pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and it is about playing and reality, not playing with reality, which is what the Randian Tech capitalists of our time and their intense investment in AI wants to do with our shared world. They think they have bent reality to their will, and Groked their way into our unconscious, but something about the way we work and play resists algorithmic domination and that quality, the quality of authentic play and aesthetic experience is what I’m trying to get at today.

Silicon Valley may have countercultural roots, but the original flower children have long since wilted. The counterculture wanted to restore playfulness and ludic innocence to everyday bourgeois life. The call for play, embodied by the Situationists’ slogan, “Sous les pavés, la plage!” has been realized in the digital blending of work and pleasure, drudgery and distraction. The destruction of stable employment has not given rise to a world of playful engagements. The California Ideology has distorted and vulgarized reality and play. For the development of the infant and the emergence of the artist, playing and reality finding are critical, risky creative processes.  Not all children are artists, but their development certainly follows an itinerary with which a real artist is familiar. The adult artist preserves certain destructive and obsessional relations with materials while also confronting realities from which children are temporarily protected. Playing and the pathways it opens up to reality are critical for the psychological and intellectual development of human beings. I will go through what some of those features are, according to D. W. Winnicott’s theory of holding and then I will talk a bit about the education of the artist, which today as we know it has been streamlined according to the institutional demands of the MFA programs of which most of you have been a part. 

It is quite striking that young people use “mental health” as a negative descriptor of the lack of mental health when confronting bureaucratic or scholastic demands upon them that they cannot fulfill. I’m going to go on a tangential path to play as a universal activity critical to mental health, which is the problem of trauma culture. In my upcoming book Traumatized: The Gentrification of Suffering and the Death of Liberalism, I argue that the dissolution of the boundaries separating the personal from the political as engineered by Second Wave Feminism after the New Left has not prevented the hyperaccumulation of capital and the immiseration of the working class. It has instead been content to win a cultural revolution in which members of the professional classes have monopolized the language of trauma and recovery in order to make every space a space of potential personal offense and symbolic violation. Under the aegis of trauma culture, a particularly brittle subject is promoted as an avatar of psychological vulnerability, to which the other majority must be subjugated. This socially engineered intersubjective field erases all possibility of collaboration or solidarity. Its reified form of human relations extracts empathy by blackmail and suppresses dissent, and demands absolute emotional and epistemological compliance with irrationality. Denouncing ideas of universality, as in Winnicott’s universal principles of play or Marx’s ideal of the universal experience of wage labor under capital, trauma culture and its ancillary political forms romanticize pre-industrial sensibilities and cultural practices, reifies “traditional practices,” and takes for granted the productive capacity unleashed by capital as it supplanted feudalism and agricultural modes of production. Trauma culture is a powerful formula that promulgates recognition at the expense of redistribution and it allows for the domination of the wage relation to remain intact while the expansion of identity inclusion stages a purely performative set of ritualized tolerance activities. Tolerance is weak sauce for living, working, and playing with others. Liberal hegemony may have been beaten back by the far right, but if the Left doesn’t mount a powerful critique of liberalism’s ideological and affective coercion, we will have no hope of envisioning—much less leading—a mass movement against oppression, domination and the carnivalesque reactionary politics that turned out to have such emotional appeal. Hatred characterizes both sides of the political divide, but the Left/liberal inheritors of the 1960s counterculture seem uniquely incapable of either play or resistance. 

Creative and authentic forms of play cannot exist without one critical factor: aggression.  The infant as the subject who plays must be able to experience aggression or hatred symbolically on a world or the other—a caretaker, usually a mother—that is resilient enough to survive such attacks. The mother or primary caretaker has to be entirely preoccupied with the needs of a dependent child, while adapting to her infant’s emergence as a node of world-finding aggressive impulses. Most caretakers do this without thinking and without knowledge of the complexity of the infant/world dyad. But there are critical processes of displacement and aggression in the transitional space that allows an infant to trust her surroundings enough to begin to play with the other by “using” it. This model of tolerance and toleration is dependent on the special state of the caretaker: preoccupation and identification, a state of love, if you will, that allows the infant to explore the power of her own will to destroy. The world of the infant must show a critical resilience under attack that allows for the full deployment of the human capacity for fantasy and hatred. Destructive instincts and aggression are critical to psychological development. The incapacity of today’s liberals to tolerate aggression and destructive instincts makes them uniquely incapable of confronting and differentiating between symbolic aggression and material exploitation. The environmental movement and extreme ecology promote the idea of a fragile and angry earth, Gaia. The anti-family, anti-natalist political formation promotes a hatred of kinship and would like to abolish the family as a libidinal and credit-bearing institution, in the absence of robust social networks to replace it. Sociologist Jennifer Silva has shown that today’s working class young person has less chance of forming stable families than her Professional Managerial Class (PMC) counterparts: many of the anti-family radicals I know enjoy stable family relations. The most extreme forms of these allegedly radical cultural positions contain within them a hatred of human life: transhumanism, extreme ecology seem to be self-defeating until you see that they are conveniently positioned within credentialing institutions that thrive on innovation and novelty in ‘research.’ The Professional class fetish for radicalism has dominated Left/liberal spaces for so long that many of us have simply given up questioning their first principles. In their world, the space of the artist is entirely circumscribed by morality, and the pursuit of virtue in the form of transgression and anti-normativity and anti-universalism.

Winnicott argues that play is a universal activity that allows human beings to ‘use’ the world, especially in the form of a not-me caretaker, usually a mother. Trust in this figure allows for the creative path towards a shared reality. Play leads human beings into transitional spaces. Transitional objects and transitional spaces are critical to play. Play is universal. Play is based on an ability to use the world, to use the other with impunity as a child. Through immersion in fantasy, we forge our relationships with the “not me.” Immersion in transitional spaces on the level of fantasy—are critical to forming robust relationships with reality. We live in a time when there is an unprecedented flow of information in the world, but a terrifying inability of human beings to accept or even acknowledge a shared reality.  This immersive relationship has been internally colonized by video games that I don’t play, but I believe that for a number of generations now, this form of immersion has given young people access to the production of avatars, digital bodies that inhabit worlds designed for profit and have little to do with shared objective reality. These worlds can be seductive, beautifully constructed and attached to the place in the human psyche where transitional objects and fantasy lie. 

According to Winnicott, “creative apperception” makes the individual feel that life is worth living. (Winnicott 1971, 87). Creativity is an attitude toward external reality: intelligence may serve creativity, but it is not creative in and of itself. The opposite of the creative attitude toward the world is the compliant one. Compliance for Winnicott produces a sense of futility and I would say resignation and cynicism that reified language and ideological formations demand of us. Creativity has something to do with the coordination of impulse and form, with pleasure that is corporeal and tactile. Winnicott remains frustratingly vague on what creativity actually is—except as an attitude that is not necessarily attached to a creation. For him the field of creativity lies in his accounts of his clinical practice, in which he seemed extraordinarily playful and creative, adapted to his patient’s own need for play and interpretation. The chapter on creativity is primarily occupied with his account of a man who had been in analysis for twenty-five years and with whom Winnicott produced a breakthrough when he said that he heard a girl talking in his office. This creative act of interpretation and analysis revived memories of the patient’s late mother who had expected and wanted her son to be a girl and who treated him as such during his early infancy. The labile gender identity of the patient did not offer an excuse for exposition on fluidity, but was simply incorporated into the creative collaboration between analyst and analysand in evoking a third subject in the room who demanded everyone’s attention and interpretation.

In the chapter, “The Location of Cultural Experience” Winnicott writes, that “it is not possible to be original except on the basis of tradition,” he writes, “The interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness seems to be just one more example, and a very exciting one, of the interplay between separateness and union.” (134) In this theoretical exposition about culture, the creativity located in everyone and anyone is dependent on the individual’s emergence from a state of identification and fusion with the environment and an acknowledgment of her ability to use that environment, to acknowledge its separateness in order to become an individual subject. Individuality and subjectivity are not givens.

“Of every individual who has reached the stage of being a unit with a limiting membrane and an outside and an inside, it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world that can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war. This helps, but is it enough? My claim is that if there….is a third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experience, to which the inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated.” (3)

Winnicott called the intermediate area of experience a transitional space, where transitional objects reside. In this space lies the potential for cultural experience and the symbolization of “me” and “not me.” Here lies the space of what Winnicott calls, lying, creativity, and addiction. For Winnicott as a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist, the process of therapy is best theorized as “two people playing together.” When the patient is incapable of play, the process of healing begins by the restoration of her capacity to do so. It is so difficult to imagine with the pressures of managed care that today’s mainstream therapeutic practices have anything playful about them. With the pre-approved ten sessions of therapy for distressed people, the formulaic solutions offered by the therapist are checklist adjusted. The burnout among clinicians is produced by their daily confrontation with people whose own descriptions of their distress are saturated by social media and psycho-pharmacologically sanctioned diagnoses of PTSD, bipolar, ADHD, and other personality disorders in which the contemporary consumer finds temporary solace. Ten sessions have to be pre-approved by your insurance company, unless you can pay your analyst or therapist out of pocket and out of network. The kinds of play that Winnicott describes is not ‘therapeutic’ as such: play becomes a dynamic for relating to the world and to others that the analyst interprets. But interpretation outside the ripeness of the material is indoctrination and produces compliance…When there is mutual playing, then interpretation according to accepted psychoanalytic principles can carry the therapeutic work forward. This playing has to be spontaneous, and not compliant or acquiescent, if psychotherapy is to be done.” (68). 

Trauma culture demands compliance with the DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition). Over diagnosis like over reliance on theory hinders creative finding of the self. Creativity in the transitional space occurs when the child or the artists can “manipulate external phenomena” in the service of their specific dreams and fantasies. The level at which this world is dominated by industrially-produced images is astonishing, but even so, there is a way in which that level of engagement produces symptomatic forms of identification that the child, teenager, or artist hopes to replicate on their bodies. “There is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from this to cultural experiences. (69) There is within a series of artistic practices a creative mimesis of industrially-produced images and experiences, where the play itself is about reduction of human agency and a regression toward pure enjoyment and loss of boundaries. This form of aestheticized regression leads to formlessness, installation, disorder, and anti-aesthetics that is nevertheless predicated on the fact that the installation is not in fact not discarded construction material, or an unmade bed with traces of human secretion on the sheets or the aftermath of a bad trip at a nepo baby’s loft. The trust that these scraps of experience can hold consistency relies on the aspect of “trust”—that “belongs to the potential space between (what was at first) baby and mother-figure.” The artistic practice of dematerializing art objects and embracing formless pleasures of consumption take on that edgelord aspect of human experience that nevertheless is dependent on a caretaker, a critic, and a curator recognizing this trash heap as more than a trash heap.

On the other end of image making is the, by now, much more familiar representational forms of marginal identities. We have been under the aegis of such liberal progressivism and its dematerialization of political economy for affect and feeling that has been embraced by the donor class who are eager to present the diversification of their portfolios as eagerly as the diversification of their collections. Political scientist Jennifer Pan’s recent book Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism clarified for me what identity politics in the art world actually does as not only artwashing great fortunes and great crimes, but actually strengthening the power of money within a world where social mobility has come to a standstill and the dream of artistic autonomy has been fully yoked to the fantasy of socially engineered social justice. 

Play is unpredictable, open-ended, frustrating, and often frightening. So today, in light of DSM diagnoses and algorithmically groomed checklists, patients and their therapists are consigned to a fully reified form of intersubjectivity, dominated by the language of managed austerity. Play is a part of what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and Winnicott would call object finding and health. Winnicott thought that Klein’s theory of bad and good breasts focused too much on homeostasis and not enough on the question of play as a universal form of psychological activity that has its own benefits and its own ends, especially in relationship to a shared world. 

Our collective ability to have cultural experiences is being damaged, but it is not completely destroyed. “Cultural experience begins with creative living first manifested in play.” (135). At a time of maximal dependency, the infant can begin to experience life creatively and destructively if she has confidence in the dependability of the mother-figure or the environmental elements, confidence being the evidence of dependability that is becoming introjected.” (135). The potential space between any one baby and another human is the observable transitional space of object finding and creativity. When a baby learns to live creatively, she finds objects that have already existed: she can use them and participate in cultural inheritance and collective apprehension of a sensuous, frustrating, but durable world. For Winnicott, the deprived child is “notoriously restless and unable to play and has an impoverishment of capacity to experience in the cultural field.” (137)

I have made arguments about the inheritance of accumulated wealth and social capital among the Professional Managerial Classes who have striven to guarantee that their progeny be deprived of nothing: but why is this segment of wage workers so unable to engage in the world creatively? Of what are they deprived? How did they shape the cultural field into a space of highly individualized performances of either excess or virtue? If we follow the Winnicottian model, the PMC child and parent has no confidence in the world. The PMC caretaker does not frustrate the infant and has created a world where the minimization of frustration is a defense against cultural and aesthetic experience. Winnicott makes casual mention of common property in the following passage. Please be patient with me as I think it is important to cite it in its entirety. 

“I have tried to draw attention to the importance both in theory and in practice of a third area, that of play, which expands into creative living and into the whole cultural life of man [sic]. This third area has been contrasted with inner or personal psychic reality and with the actual world in which the individual lives, which can be objectively perceived. I have located this important area of experience in the potential space between the individual and the environment, that which initially both joins and separates the baby and the mother when the mother’s love, displayed or made manifest as human reliability, does in fact give the baby a sense of trust or of confidence in the environmental factor. Attention is drawn to the fact that this potential space is a highly variable factor (from individual to individual), whereas the other two locations—personal or psychic reality and the actual world—are relatively constant, one being biologically determined and the other being common property.

The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world, depends on experiences which lead to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living. By contrast, exploitation of this area leads to a pathological condition in which the individual is cluttered up with persecutory elements of which she has no means of ridding herself. It may perhaps be seen from this how important it can be for the analyst to recognize the importance of this place, the only place where play can start, a place that is at the continuity-contiguity moment where transitional phenomena can originate. My hope is that I have begun to answer my own question: where is cultural experience located?”

In 1970s sociological studies of working class emotional life, academics discovered that the alleged authoritarianism of the working class family was based on a parental injunction to ‘stay out of trouble.’ Working class children of all races were told by parents or grandparents that obeying rules was a mode of survival in a world that was hostile to their interests. Hence the rich kid, about to be PMC (professional, managerial class), countercultural disdain for “squares” always had a class-based contempt. Remaining defiant, however, meant for the worker, remaining suspicious of authorities, “the boss,” as a mode of familial and class loyalty. PMC people are not workers, they’re “warriors.”

External compliance to rules, while maintaining a sense of internal autonomy, or even defiance. Immigrant working class families still maintain this kind of boundary, which is reminiscent, if anything, of the realism of court society aristocrats, threatened at every turn by the tyrant’s whims. It was only with Romanticism that bourgeois consciousness decided we should be and could be “authentic” and make the personal the public, and vice versa.

In the liberal classroom, PMC aspirants or graduate students and their PMC liberal professors participate in a managed dissolution of boundaries (based on sharing private experiences and feelings) and a deep emotionality about the educational mission of the University itself.

The program I teach in now says we study “power” without any interrogation of what kinds of power are being exercised by this assumption that our institutionalized position is one of endless, infinite “critique.”

Rather than offering the possibility of mastering a methodology, a set of self-critical institutional analytic tools, or God forbid a ‘canon’, students have fully internalized a totalizing, bourgeois, Enlightenment attitude toward the world, where instrumental reason, based on dissolving binaries, decolonizing curricula, problematizing identities, etc. will “unpack” “disrupt” and “subvert” both “world” and the power that courses through it.

External and internal compliance is demanded of us in the white collar work place where the space for skepticism is reserved for the iniquitous, the reactionary, the asshole. Institutional and academic conformity with anti-historical, anti-materialist, hegemonic, American liberal ideas of how to perform an idea of innocence and virtue are requirements by which one will be judged by a jury of one’s peers. Is this democracy? Is this liberalism? Is this the cultural revolution, going on since the late 1980s in the halls of academe that has presided over the catastrophic decline in interest in the liberal arts and the humanities in the core institutions of the Imperium?

Winnicott’s account of cultural experience was based on positive descriptions of creative attitudes and shared realities, experiences of transitional spaces that allowed maximal dependency to achieve through play a robust relationship to the world. I want to return there before I address the need for artists and intellectuals, cultural workers and working class people to cultivate the creative attitude for living by finding a shared world, by rejecting a compliant attitude toward persecutory injunctions for purity. Ask for truthful accounts of the present, don’t be myopic about single issues. The veil of modesty surrounding liberalism’s claims on truth values has been stripped away, especially in the Democratic Party’s attitude toward the issue of Palestine. Do not give into an endless cycle of outrage and despair. We have to continue living with creativity and determination so that the truth of what is happening in cultural and liberal institutions can be told one day. In order to remake a subject of politics and a subject of aesthetic, we need to encourage each other to respect the past, in order that we may destroy the falsehoods of the present in the name of a better future. Now is not the time for despair: we need creative engagement with each other and our damaged world, now more than ever. 

Reference: Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications.