Serious play: Young people’s deployment of culturally subversive sign within postmodern capitalism

Abstract

The question of capitalist domination that functions through an overcoding of the social has significant implications for what constitutes forms of political resistance. Under a system whose rule is sustained through a constant proliferation of ever-expanding categories of code, any form of political resistance or revolt premised either in representation or the communication of nominalized truth is easily assimilated and recoded within the money form. Any rational appeal to the structural components of civil society will similarly be recoded. The question then becomes within such a regime of rule premised in transcendent code, what are the most effective modes of revolution and resistance? Perhaps one alternate form of political engagement might well be defined as what will be termed here, serious play. Play, in this context, is a behavior that has the ability to subvert and transform the platforms that capitalism uses to both obscure its actual function and to spread the codes of the economy. To do this, playful behavior needs to be able to metacommunicate about the economy’s/capitalism’s communication system code. This chapter explores the vernacular of serious play through the actions and rhetoric of radical youth groups in the late 1960s and in contemporary movements today.