My Play of Concerns Concerning "Play"

Jenny, in her October 19^th post, “Tea Cake and Literary Play,” presents an excellent deconstructionist reading of Tea Cake. Tea Cake, she argues, “both speaks back to a trope and denies it” and this “acknowledgment of tropes, stereotypes, and a literary tradition (and its foils)” arises from literary play. Play is “a constant questioning and substitution of one idea for another, a guiltless review of old methods and tired theory”—a place to experiment with the infinitude of meaning without adhering to “expectations for discovering a universal human truth” (Colmenero). This view of play seems so optimistic, even “joyous” as Derrida calls it; it’s a search for meaning that “is no longer turned toward the origin [and] tries to pass beyond man and humanism” (Derrida 292) It’s the view of play that Derrida wants interpreters of meaning (literary, historical, philosophical, etc.) to choose. Because the only other interpretation of interpretation, the one far more restricting and inhibitive, is one that ”dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile” (Derrida 292). But is it possible that the exile, the search for an origin outside of play, is not chosen, but forced upon a scholar because the people she is studying were stripped of their meanings in a previous forced exile, one that occurred centuries ago, but whose effects are still felt today? I ask, what is the “play” of someone in chains?

Hortense J. Spillers describes how the subjugation of the Africans by the Whites was achieved by the stripping of their figurative and actual skins. Words and paper (money, bills of credit, bills of sale, deeds of ownership) compounded with the “calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, [and] the bullet” worked to remove and breakdown the  African “body,” the “point of convergence [where] biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and even psychological fortunes join” (Spillers 67);  Their language, family units, social structures, cultural identities, their gender, their humanness, their flesh, their personalities, even their names were taken from them, leaving a gaping hole that could only be replaced by one word—property. Once they became property, once this rupture of their signifying chain occurred, one could argue they gained infinite play but only in the hands of their masters,  because what the slaves meant, how they could signify,or how they could participate(i.e. how they were talked about) in discourse was determined solely by the men and women who owned them.

What we realize is that play is not just something people have; it’s also something that is ascribed to them. And I ask, how is this situation different than the voices that subaltern historians want to ascribe to their lost peoples? What is “play” but an elite, western, intellectual idea that makes us think we’re making something better, something unstructured and more liberated, when really “play” is the degree of manipulation or elasticity within a person, idea, or character, their infinite ability to conform and work towards the arguments for meaning that scholars, owners, rulers, dictators, writers, etc. particularly want to make. Thus, Tea Cake’s play is wonderfully expansive, but only because he can fit into and be used for so many different arguments; his versatility enables so many readings of the text. I myself made a similar argument about Hyde in my October 11^th blogpost, “Hyde. Derrida. Play. Go!” So eager was I to expound Hyde’s “joyous affirmation of ... play” that I forgot to include myself with the list of scholars who use Hyde to make a point (Derrida 292) – that I attempted to “control him through knowledge even as [I] restore[d] versions of causality and self-determination to him” (Spivak 9). Over this past quarter, as I have argued  for Hyde’s freedom and unique voice, I have also performed my ownership of him.  Perhaps this usurpation isn’t so terrifying when discussing literary characters, but what both Jenny and I failed to address is the real life consequences of “play” when applied to historical peoples. Stripped of their own culturally determined sense of meaning, all their own boundaries removed, African-American slaves could then serve whatever purpose/signify any meaning their masters chose for them. It’s easy to see why Spillers, or any African-American Studies scholar might dream of an “origin which escapes play” because such an origin would be able to escape the exploitative “play” of the African-American slave that occurred during their years of enslavement. I will not try to argue that such an origin exists, but I've tried to explore why such an origin might be desirable.