The following essay was submitted in June 2023 for the second module on the MSc Mad Studies at Queen Margaret University, XM015 - Principles of Public Sociology.
“Everything we experience today in the mode of a limit, or as foreign, or as intolerable will have returned to the serenity of the positive.” (Foucault, 1995)
SOCIOLOGICAL PLAY
This essay expands on the project of reframing madness-as-play, emerging from the belief that if Mad Studies is to prove “part of a wider revolutionary project” (Menzies and LeFrançois, 2013, p.17) then it must also give emancipatory new ways of approaching madness. The lens of play provides one such approach, inviting new beginnings (Rapti and Gordon, 2021, p.21) by offering “a robust challenge to entrenched assumptions” (Hirst, 2019) about both madness and play. Here the concept is played with sociologically, exploring its implications in relation to the social categories of age, gender, ethnicity and class.
MADNESS-AS-PLAY
Due to its ambiguous core, it is not easy to pin down theoretically what is meant by play, but “we all know what playing feels like” (Sutton-Smith, 2001, p.1). Bateson explains the metacommunicative paradox of play as: “the playful nip denotes the bite, but does not denote that which would be denoted by the bite” (Bateson, 1955). It means what it means but doesn’t mean what it means. At a metaphysical level the consequences of this paradox means that play appears to occupy “a threshold between reality and unreality” where “players unravel in some way the accepted orthodoxies of the world in which they live” (Sutton-Smith, 2001, p.1, 166). However, it is misleading to characterise play in relation to the duo real/unreal, rather it is better understood from the point of view of the Deleuzian dynamic actual/virtual (Olsson, 2009, p.191). When we think of the fantasy worlds created in play we usually treat them as unreal. Instead we should see them as virtuality, a generative realm of multiple potentialities, which is “not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality” (Deleuze, 2001, p.31). In other words, the play world is a dimension of reality itself; it is fully real in terms of its effects, even if it isn’t necessarily so in terms of concrete existence. Play is the becoming-actual of virtuality, not the becoming-real of possibility. This distinction between actualisation and realisation is essential because in the latter the possible or fantasy always resembles, and is constrained by, the real from which it is constructed. Whereas play is not so constrained, there are often radical elements that do not adhere to the real at all. Rather play is a:
a time/space in which ever-present virtualities are actualised, producing moments in which [we] are becoming-different; that is, following [our] own desires rather than following…determined pathways (Lester, 2013, p.131)
This ontology of play appears to correspond closely, if not identically, to that of madness. It does a good job at explaining why “poor-reality testing” is misunderstood as the “quintessential sign of madness” (Sass, 1995, p.1). It is not that the mad have lost touch with reality, rather they are, like in play, constructively “plunging into an intense actualization of virtuality” (Olsson, 2009, p.192), in which it's understood that “play fulfils its purpose only if the player loses himself in play” (Gadamer, 2004, p.103). This is “a movement away from order, stability and predictability” (Lester, 2013, p.136) in a time/space “where one is exempt from life’s customs, methods and decrees” (Ackerman, 2000, p.6). This is one where the madman, or the person at play, is able to actualise all kinds of experiences that we characterise as unreal or impossible i.e. voices, hallucinations, delusions, perceptual changes, special powers etc.
Central to both experiences of play and madness is becoming, “the affirmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation” (Braidotti, 1993). Just as the key characteristic of play is argued to be that it is autotelic, this becoming also “produces nothing other than itself” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.238). It is rather for its own sake. But it’s important not to neglect that such play can be “as painful as it is pleasurable, as individual as it is universal, and as mandatory as it is voluntary” (Trammell, 2023, p.2).
MADNESS IN THE METHOD
It is crucially important that “If Mad Studies achieves its objectives, it needs to have as part of its end goal the shaking up, the disturbing, of all forms of academic knowledge” (Ingram, 2016). This means maddening the message and the medium; at all levels we need to start playing again. This essay therefore draws on the fourth dimension of a new architectural approach to (mad) pedagogy (Bailey, 2022) the author invented. This dimension of the model combines visual shifts with critical analysis. You will be provided with four pairs of glasses. You need a piece of white paper in front of you, a pen and an open mind…
READING GLASSES = AGE
…from the perspective of different age groups, considering particularly the elderly, the middle aged and youth positions.
Put the reading glasses on. What does madness-as-play mean to you from the perspective of the elderly? From the youth? From the middle? Put some thoughts down on your paper. Then keep the glasses on whilst you read…
The involuntary hospitalisation of those having mad experiences is primarily derived from the parental powers, parens patriae, of the State (Feuerstein et al., 2005), and those subject to this authority are handled like “children to be kept under constant observation by officials acting as parents” (Schenk, 2020, p.145). This is further manifest in the deprivation of liberty with respect to decision making authority on the part of patients in terms of forced treatment. The mad are infantilised. Or put another way, to be mad is to be not adult.
Central to the contribution of the philosophy of play is “its ability to deconstruct…limited adultist horizons and reconstruct them through childist critique” (Wall, 2013, p.41). A postmodern childism, like its feminist counterpart, problematizes the bifurcation denoted by age (or gender), emphasising that the distinction is always a social, not a hard fact. It's crucial to acknowledge that play is central to the identity formation of the social category of “adult”. Within the system of differences (i.e. Derridean differance) of language, concepts are only defined in relation to other concepts. Adult is not child; child is not adult. Play is not work. Play is not rational. Play is not adult. In this binary world, within an adult-dominated power structure, play “is represented as an object that distinguishes childhood and positions children as lacking” (Lester, 2013, p.135) in comparison to adults as complete. In other words, to be an adult is to not play.
The point at which we draw the line between the fantasy play of a child interacting with an imaginary friend and an adult psychotic hallucinating seems to ultimately be determined by age more than any other factor. As a society “we accept that experiences that can be abnormal in adulthood can be perfectly typical in childhood” (Fernyhough, 2008) to the extent that from an adultist perspective, “all children are psychotic” (Fernyhough, 2008). A UK study found that almost two-thirds of children report having at least one “psychotic-like experience” (Laurens et al., 2012). This number roughly halves in teenagers and drops again in adults (Bell, 2015). It is presumably that such experiences are typical of childhood that the actual diagnosis of psychosis in children is very rare, with a prevalence of only 0.4% between 5 and 18 years (NICE, 2013). The marginalisation of playing with reality (imaginative/fantasy play) to children is a mechanism that reinforces the sanist norms of adultism (and the adultist norms of sanity). Play “becomes a medium for fixing a child’s identity as a future adult, the child required to become that which it is currently not…children need to grow up and out of play” (Lester, 2013, p.135) into an adulthood that prioritises rationality, productivity, and conformity. Understanding madness-as-play in relation to age shows us that to be mad is to be not adult and to be adult is to not play.
What is problematised in madness by a sanist and adultist psychiatry is precisely that play as “the endless imagination of life’s unfolding” (Wall, 2013, p.35) is a way of “becoming-child” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.277) and this
Child as immanent distillation constitutes a non-axiomatic subject whose impetus is the infinite creative expression of its idiosyncratic constitution…It is expressly such a child that must be denied within regimes of sovereign control through the denial of its status as a common attribute in all human subjectivity. It is critical to modes of appropriation and domination that such a child be ghettoized and radically excluded from the worlds of that axiomatically constituted as adult. (Tarulli and Skott-Myhre, 2006, p.192)
The child, as the mad, are part of the same deterritorializing movement central to play that breaks apart the identitarian binary oppositions that form the very basis of consensus reality, and it is this ontology of difference, an unbounded multiplical potential to open up new potential, that is not adult and must be shut down. This is achieved by the paradoxical constitution of this playful vitality as a lack within which “mad people and children become ‘needy’...examples of ignorance…in experience and sense” (Olsson, 2009, p.145) in contrast to the sane and adult. In practical terms, “the same kind of desiring-repression that is at stake within the walls of the psychiatric clinic also functions in…schools” (Olsson, 2009, p.145). The mad, like children, are deemed in need of control because they play. Centrally, in the West, it is by taking childhood, that we characterise principally by play, “as the target of its action, both of its knowledge and its power, that psychiatry [and adulthood] succeeds in being generalised” (Foucault, 2003, p.304).
HEART GLASSES = GENDER
…from the perspective of gender, considering feminine, masculine, and LGBT+ positions.
Put the heart glasses on. What does madness-as-play mean to you from a gendered position? What about degendered? Queer? Put some thoughts down on your paper. Then keep the glasses on whilst you read…
In the same way that to be mad is centrally to be not adult, it is also deeply linked (in the West) to being not man, in the sense that “what we consider 'madness', whether it appears in women or in men, is either the acting out of the devalued female role or the total or partial rejection of one's sex-role stereotype” (Chesler, 1974, p.56). Although this depends on what we consider madness in the first place for “gender is embedded in the very construction of concepts of madness” (Busfield and Campling, 1996, p.98) as historically there seems to be a “connection between psychosis and the masculine…[and] hysteria with the feminine” (Woods, 2011, p.121). Considering psychosis remains “perpetually invoked as the disciplinary limit point” (Woods, 2011, p.15), for psychiatry feminine madness is defined as comprehensible – as if the woman can be understood by man – whereas masculine madness is that which “exceeds or exists beyond our capacity for comprehension and representation” (Woods, 2011, p.8). Psychiatry is therefore profoundly sexist at its deepest level in suggesting that the sublime itself is gendered male.
Nevertheless, when I talk about madness-as-play I remain focused here on psychotic experience, as related specifically to the fact that these experiences challenge expected reality perception, a reality (i.e. Symbolic order) which is itself gendered; “a more or less stable consensual reality under the ambivalent rule of the paternal law” (Schuster, 2016). Understanding madness-as-play acknowledges that “instead of relying on the framework of given symbolic meanings and consensual social narratives, [psychotics]...find their own way” (Hook, 2020, p.129). In other words, despite its masculine associations, psychosis can actually best be understood not only as a “becoming-child” but also as a “becoming-woman” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.248). This is not meant as an “imitating or assuming the female form” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.275) but an escape from binary organisations (molar identities), in which individuals move in unpredictable trajectories and relations (Sotirin, 2011, p.122). In short, they play and to play is not man. This is to say that madness understood as play is a movement that disrupts existing despotic signifiers of gender.
This of course intersects with what was said about the becoming-child-as-play. If we acknowledge gender in relation to the playing child, they are first a girl; it is their becoming that is stolen first (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.176). (“To play like a girl” takes on new meaning here, indicating not a weakness but an unwillingness to play according to the rules). In other words, as much as psychiatrization, or sanism more broadly, is linked to the problematization of childhood in general, this childhood is itself gendered, and “of all disadvantaged groups, females have been (and remain) psychiatry’s real obsession” (Cohen, 2016, p.139). The parentalism central to its operation is necessarily patriarchal, “psychiatric discourse [i]s a means of ideological control of female behaviour, both policing the boundaries of acceptable gender roles as well as reinforcing heteronormativity” (Cohen, 2016, p.154). It is through its focus on the female that psychiatry upholds binary gender itself and historically has been deeply involved in problematising those who do not conform, or play outside, such standards. Namely, the queer.
As argued in a previous essay, existing approaches to madness, understood as psychoses, are weighed down by the over-seriousness of imperatives meaning or rationality. Seeing madness-as-play encourages us to lighten up about madness in ways that emphasise its life-affirming qualities (without continuing to acknowledge that play can awry). Such a conceptual framework resonates deeply with a queering movement which possesses the same “vital force” (Nigianni and Storr, 2009, p.1) as play. Just as “queerness as playful or explorative is a common theme in queer theory” (Harper, Taylor and Adams, 2018, p.4) so madness as playful should become a common theme in mad theory. Indeed, framing madness in this radically affirmative (but not romanticised) way appears to be an act of neuroqueering, a “challenging, subverting, defying, and/or creatively fucking with neuronormativity” (Walker, 2022). Although one should remain cautious of the biomedical overtones of the neuro in the neurodiversity movement that essentially affirms psychiatrically constructed identities, which despite originally intending to be as broad as possible is increasingly narrowed to autism (Walker, 2021). Ensuring that madness proper as a sociological limit point that challenges this discourse itself is part of this discussion is crucial; we must have mad approaches (rather than neuroqueer) to madness.
AVIATOR GLASSES = ETHNICITY
…from the perspective of ethnicity, considering the positions of different ethnic groups, such as black, white, asian etc.
Put the aviator glasses on. What does madness-as-play mean to you for different ethnic groups? Put some thoughts down on your paper. Then keep the glasses on whilst you read…
The psychiatrisation of non-white individuals is clearly demonstrated in the UK white people having by far the lowest rate of detention under the Mental Health Act, compared to black people who were almost 5 times as likely (NHS Digital, 2023). This is also evident in the diagnosis of psychotic disorders being as much as five times higher in some ethnic minority groups, such as black Caribbeans, “by contrast, there is no such pattern in Caribbean countries, suggesting the increased risk is context dependent” (UCL, 2020).
Aside from its positioning as not adult and not man, mad or psychotic experiences are positioned as not white. Western psychiatry has “whiteness embedded within its DNA” and has from its inception been, and continues to be, a (post)colonial project, in which “white philosophy determines the meaning of all realities…and defines the norms” (King, 2016, p.70) ignoring the different perceptions of reality and behaviours across cultures and consistently turning its attention to “the pathology of the ‘normal’ native’s mind” (Vaughan, 2007, p.2). Nevertheless,“the history of psychiatry and empire is more complex and more subtle than one which sees psychiatry simply as a tool of colonial racist oppression” (Vaughan, 2007, p.9) as it is rather its role in an “epistemic imperialism” (Harrison, 2015, p.190) that has been crucial in upholding a “colonial hierarchy of Knowledge, Knowing, Knower as detached, objective, universal” (Liebert, 2018, p.9), that frames “other forms of understanding and expression…as superstition, folklore or mythology” (Sharp, 2008, p.110) or, of course, madness. Ultimately this means “the subaltern cannot speak” (Spivak, 1988, p.308), forever lost in translation to “epistemic violence” (Spivak, 1988, p.280) of the language of the West.
But even more importantly is that as the effective overlord of this episteme has a fundamental role in subjectivity, in “the coloniality of being” (Wynter, 2003). The current neocolonial, neoliberal version of this is the “industrious exportation” of Western psy-discourses of mental illness that medicalise madness, which is producing a “flattening of the landscape of the human psyche itself” (Watters, 2010, p.1). The colonial project is more importantly a “metaphysics – the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West” (Derrida 1982, p.213) that revolves around (natural and social) scientific rationality/irrationality as its “organizing principle and master code” (Wynter, 2003, p.300). This discourse, which contends that this “science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific” (Frank, Gleiser and Thompson, 2019), has been crucial in the “de-supernaturalizing of our modes of being human” (Wynter, 2003, p.264) reducing human subjectivity to a “mere mechanism…[in] the biocentric disciplinary paradigms in whose terms we at present know our social reality” (Wynter, 2003, p.330). This “metaphysical catastrophe” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016) has been fundamental in “propagat[ing] waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.178). It is the movement that has been responsible for declaring experiences that do not translate into its objective, white rationality to be declared, not white, not adult, not Man, madness. Psychiatry has remained the violence or threat thereof that underpins this whole system.
Although “critical psychologists from around the world [correctly] name the destruction of imagination as central to the colonization of the psyche” (Liebert, 2018, p.110), what they seem to miss is that this imagination, from a Western standpoint, is at its most vital in play, where the “distinction between belief and make-believe breaks down” (Huizinga, 2016, p.25). Play is seen to challenge Western metaphysics because it fundamentally undermines the certainty and seriousness necessary to its direct access to the Truth; it cannot accommodate the becoming of play, that “playing is never completely stable or closed off to reinventions” (Janning, 2019). Perhaps this explains why canonical theorists of play have racist leanings in their writing (Trammell, 2022) pointing to play as the primary fear of coloniality. Huizinga argues
Considering the whole sphere of so-called primitive culture as a play-sphere…the savage himself knows no conceptual distinction between being and playing; he knows nothing of identity, of image or symbol… For the savage, with his extremely limited powers of logical coordination and arrangement, practically everything is possible (Huizinga, 2016, p.25, 129)
This deep connection between play and possibility is central to the move to relegate this experience to a lack. It parallels too the connections made between “both the child and the colonized…envisioned as representing imperfect specimens of the enlightened European man…[as] irrational ‘becomings’” (Nieuwenhuys, 2013) in need of control.
As Fanon writes personifying the colonisers,
…we will turn to you as we do to our children—to the innocent, the ingenuous, the spontaneous…We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world…What matters now is no longer playing the game of the world, but subjugating it with integers and atoms (Fanon, 2008, p.100)
This takes us back to how deeply psychiatry is linked to the play of the child, pathologising those who would approach such becoming as mad; to experience anything other than the Truth laid down by coloniality is to potentially be psychotic (Liebert, 2018, 109).
It’s important to remember that colonial conceptualisations of play and madness are only possible because its disenchanted (Federici, 2004, p.174) metaphysics splits imagination and reality (Liebert, 2018, p.110) in the first place with Cartesian certainty (Humpston, 2022). Without the bifurcated logic that engineers an absolutist boundary between true/false, real/fantasy, rational/irrational, the idea that those experiencing madness “often seem to live in two parallel but separate worlds: consensual reality and the realm of their hallucinations and delusions” (Sass, 1995, p.20) wouldn’t be possible – the distinction between the two worlds collapses. Nor would the idea of imaginary play, as it too requires a borderland to play in – belief/make-believe. Overall this dualism constitutes a form of “ontologic violence” (Liebert, 2018, p.111) by framing these experiences as “ontologically impossible” (Humpston, 2022). Coloniality implies that the colonized – the child, the woman, the black, the mad – cannot (or refuse to) make such distinctions, such that they know no difference between being and playing or madness, and therefore require subjugation.
SPORTS GLASSES = CLASS
…from the perspective of different classes, considering the positions of the rich, the middle classes and the poor.
Put the sports glasses on. What does madness-as-play mean to you for different classes? Put some thoughts down on your paper. Then keep the glasses on whilst you read…
Of course underlying the coloniality of psychiatry (and related disciplines) is the socio-economic system itself. It’s important to remember how crucial “the capitalist class is historically in constructing the dominant understandings of who we are, what is expected of us, and the limits of our behaviour” (Cohen, 2016, p.vii). Aside from their positioning as not adult, not man and not white, both madness and play are seen by this system as not work.
Crucially, in its “aiming at controlling nature, the capitalist organization of work must refuse the unpredictability implicit in the practice of magic” (Federici, 2004, p.172), which is to say by magic those experiences that are seen to lie at the heart of play (and madness): capacities that enact “the liveliness of the land, the non-linearity of time, and the relationality of our selves” (Liebert, 2018, p.7) which are “premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things” (Federici, 2004, p.173). These other ways of engaging with phenomena must be restrained to ensure capitalism’s monopoly on Truth and enable its mode of production that demands predictability not potentiality. Its curtailment of such alternatives primarily occurs through bureaucratic, and ultimately psychiatric, regulation and violence, such that “the threat of force invades practically every aspect of our existence” (Graeber, 2015, p.196). At the heart of the capitalist state is its fear of play as the opposite of work, as activity untrammelled by rules of any sort – “the decoded flows of desire…[that] deliberately scrambles all the codes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.161, 15). It consequently constructs an impossible “dream of a world where play has been limited entirely – or, at best, boxed away in some remote location far from any serious, consequential human endeavor” (Graeber, 2015, p.204). Play as the “general form of transgression, whose visible face madness has been for centuries” (Foucault, 1995, p.293). The concept of madness “in the mode of a limit…as foreign…as intolerable…as exteriority” (Foucault, 1995, p.290) became used to regulate this play as antithetical to the socio-economic order. What began in the West, with the great confinement (Foucault, 2006), and witch-hunting (Federici, 2004), continues with psychiatry in terms of its pivotal role “in shaping, managing, and promulgating the regulatory ideal…the regime of self” (Woods, 2011, p.41). Madness, in the same way as play, is constructed in relation to the subject’s resistance to labour, which is to say resistance to the classist, bourgeois selfhood necessary to the function of a capitalist workforce. A commitment to productivity that is, like its metaphysics, “essentially theological” (Graeber, 2018, p.221).
However, one shouldn’t forget that “capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continuously seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending towards that limit” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.34). This is to say that not working is crucial to the workings of capitalism. Deterritorializing play met with violent reterritorialization as madness is the very engine that drives the capitalist social order (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.175); “everywhere capitalism sets in motion schizo-flows that animate "our" arts and "our" sciences, just as they congeal into the production of "our own" sick…[the mad]”” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p.245). Seeing madness-as-play helps to explain why our socio-political horizons have become so constrained; why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Fisher, 2009). That the social, economic and political experimentation, the play, characteristic of human society for millennia has become muted to the point of negligibility because it is pathologized as madness. Graeber and Wengrow raise the crucial question in their New History of Humanity, “If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p.116). The answer, when play became madness.
CONCLUSION
Society variously constructs play paradoxically as that which transcends, as the refusal of identity, of profound possibility, as the realm of experimentation, only to then radically confine such vitality as a lack, as not adult, not man, not white, and not work. What I have revealed here is that when stripped away of its heavy baggage, what we call madness can be seen sociologically as simply play that challenges such confines. Cooper argues that "the future of madness is its end, its transformation into a universal creativity which is the lost place where it came from in the first place” (Cooper, 1978, p.149). I suggest that lost place is play.
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