| The concept of play has been used to describe accounts of the individual's orientation toward, and behavior in, 'postmodern' consumer culture. 'Play' seems to adequately characterize the fluid relationships within a figural 'reality,' where meaning appears to rest in delightfully transitory sensations and visual impressions. However, as Jameson notes, the crucial dilemma of the postmodern condition occurs with the poststructuralist invitation to play. For that is "the moment in which aesthetics gives way to ethics, in which the problem of the postmodern;This dilemma is the net result of the transposition of deterministic, structuralist and deconstructionist literary paradigms into an Anglo-American tradition which pivots around the 'subject' and 'free will.' In response to this dilemma, I proposes to showcase a Winnicottian (re)conceptualization of play. Instead of a meaningless, schizoid trifling with the 'realities' of contemporary culture, play is conceptualized as a creative activity which allows for the construction of a subject capable of cohering in the postmodern framework.;This identity construction must then be situated within the apparent chaos of postmodern culture itself. A Winnicottian interpretation easily contains this chaos, insofar as chaos might be said to facilitate the boundarilessness required by genuine experiences of play. This holds true even if 'postmodern chaos' is construed as consisting in an ahistorical figural reality which not only problematizes the referent, but attempts to co-opt perception into the service of consumption. For, I argue (1) that figural reality presupposes a dialectic in which the individual is required to take an active, constructive role. (2) This role presupposes that the individual ultimately coheres through a narrative which encompasses past, present, and future.;These arguments, and the difficulties which they present, will be examined as I reconfigure postmodern culture itself through a dynamic extension of reader-response theories. The transposition of this paradigm onto a cultural level lends to culture an interactive potential, one which implicitly rests upon the infrastructure of modernistic tenets. These tenets reconfigure the individual and postmodern culture in a reflexive, yet meaningful way. |
