Playing with a player

A couple of nights ago, Helena Iara did not want to go to sleep.  It was about nine PM, when she usually starts to calm down and prepare for bed, but she only wanted to play.  "Brincar, Papai, brincar!" she insisted (Play, Daddy, play).  Since Helena sometimes categorizes her books as toys, I proposed that she "play" by reading them with me.  "No, no!" she declared, pointing to a ball and some stuffed animals.  "Brincar com brincador!" (Play with the player!).

 Who is the player?  Helena, one would expect, but that's not what she said.  The toys are the players, the active agents.  Books, unlike balls and stuffed toys, just don't cut it as "brincadores."

I wrote last week about how Helena attributes intentionality to inanimate things as a way to explain the failure of success of cause and effect.  Here, again, we see how children see "things" as "people" -- toys and balls have their own perspective on the world, their own interests and desires.  They are capable of playing.  At first, this seems like a truly alien and even wrong-headed (childish?) idea, but I don't think it's really wrong.  Anyone who has ever played a sport seriously knows that the ball has a mind of its own: this is even true of soccer, where the ball is perfectly round (think of the polemics that emerge at the beginning of a new world cup when players get to use a new ball for the first time), and even more in football or rugby.  In other sports, we see something similar: car drivers and bikers treat their vehicles as living subjects; skiers and surfers know that snow and waves are temperamental, often angry, other times gentle.

Above and beyond that, a child needs a toy in order to play.  In some way, there has to be an other in the picture, even when that other is a little stuffed thing, a rock, a bunch of sticks.  There is something powerful in that other, even when I invent it.

So as much as I tried, Helena would not accept a book as a "player", as a real toy.  Stories didn't have quite the right kind of otherness for the fun she was looking for.

The "real" Pocoyo

Yesterday, before Rita, Helena, and I got together with some friends who live here in Los Angeles, I was trying to remind her who they were.  "We saw them lots there in Brazil, Helena, and then stayed in their house last year... and remember Tiago, the little boy?  He was born in Spain, where the real Pocoyo is from..."

As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I heard how silly they were.  Yes, the Pocoyo cartoons that Helena loves so much are, in fact, made in Spain.  She often watches to them on Youtube in Castillian Spanish.  But "the real Pocoyo?"  I wanted to indicate something "more" than the plastic Pocoyo toy she plays with every day, but could I possibly say that the video of Pocoyo, something that exists only as the 1s and 0s of a computer program, is any more "real" than the plastic and rubber Pocoyo she was playing with?

In the late 1980s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard made quite a splash on the academic scene with his idea of the simulacrum, defined as "the copy for which there is no original."  He saw this phenomenon everywhere in postmodern culture, from the fake culture of Disney's Epcot to Hollywood movies, but it seems that a plastic doll representing an electronic cartoon, where there was never even a "real" drawing of Pocoyo, stands at the peak of the pyramid of simulacra.  When we think of the intentionally decontextualized world in which Pocoyo lives, where the background is pure white most of the time, it becomes even harder to imagine an original of anything having to do with the character.

For all of the nihilism of Baudrillard and his followers, a heavy tone of moralism always accompanied their talk of simulation and simulacra: it was as if they said, "This is how the world is now, but it wasn't always this bad."   After all, the basis for most Western philosophy is Plato's theory of the forms, some original "real," of which all of the things we see in our world are nothing but copies.  Plato condemned art because it was a copy of the things of the world, and as such, really only a copy of a copy, derivative to the second level.

Pocoyo, however, seems to steal the fire from the moralizing postmodernists.  Pocoyo isn't a copy of a real boy, and his world is not a copy of ours.  Certainly there are some references to things that we know, but we don't judge Pocoyo by whether it is true to reality or not.  It's not about representation at all.  It's about fun.  About play.  And though we may play-act, though children may pretend to be something when they play, we don't principally judge a soccer game or play with dolls by whether it "truly represents the world."  We can call it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but never true or false.  Play escapes the logic of the real and of truth.  It's something else entirely.

And the "real Pocoyo?"  Who cares.  What matters is how Helena makes her doll run around, take baths, cook, slide down the couch.  It's about play, not about truth.

Isn't she just a doll?

On our recent trip to Salvador and Recife, Helena Iara heard one comment time and time again: "Isn't she just a little doll?" ("É como uma bonequinha!")  Helena is a cute baby, but what really attracted interest was how blond she is: in the very African cities of Brazil's northeast (and where the harsh sun burns everyone black pretty soon), such a white baby is shocking.  I'm not exaggerating when I say she stopped traffic on downtown streets.


I began to tell Helena a little more about the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, which seemed quite apropos... Baudrillard's basic idea is that in post-modernity, the sense of reference is lost.  Instead of a picture signifying some real thing "behind" it, representation develops a new relationship to reality.  What, he asks, does the China exhibition at Epcot Center have to do with China?  He defines the simulacrum as a "Copy for which there is no original."

As I explained to Helena, it seemed even more perverse the doll -- originally a signifier of a baby, but now a kind of simulacrum -- would now become the reference by which real babies are judged.  If a baby is "like a doll", then she is pretty and good. Certain other comments we heard on the street also made it clear that the comparison had to do with wealth: several women declared "She looks like a soap opera baby!" while one street boy innocently spoke the truth that lies behind all of these comments: "She looks almost like a baby of the rich people!"  The rich, like a doll, are unreal and perfect, powerful but untouchable.

Fortunately, Rita was listening to my diatribe and stopped me before it got out of hand.  She explained to Helena that the real problem wasn't ontological, but practical.  When people describe a baby as a doll, they may also treat the girl as a thing.  The cheek-pinching, hair-mussing, and invasive stares she got from people she had never seen before and would never see again served as very good evidence of this fact.

In the end, I still contend that issues of the constitution of being in postmodernity are important... but Rita is basically right.  The real issue with seeing the other was a doll is that she becomes a thing.  Prized and treasured, perhaps, but basically an object.  Instead of another subject with whom I interact, people on the street wanted an object with which they could play.

Horses, representation, play

Last night, Rita and I took Helena Iara to a country restaurant for dinner with her family, and as one might expect, a baby does not find adult conversation interesting enough to sit quietly at the table.  Fortunately, the restaurant owners know this, and they had build a wooden jungle gym, swings, and a couple of kitschy model horses and oxen harnessed to an old cart and landau.  I took Helena out to the front, and we played on the swings and then walked over to the horse.

As we sat on the landau (I say landau, as a two wheeled cart, but do they need to be covered?  I'm not sure: certainly it wasn't a surrey) behind the horse, a three year old boy was playing on the horse's back, and my mind inevitably (if you have read this blog before, you know that "inevitably" isn't as ironic as it might seem) turned to Plato's idea of representation.  Plato said that what's "really real" is the ideas, and that what we see as "real things" (horses, in this particular case) are nothing but inferior reflections of the idea of a horse.  Art, as a representation of this representation, is even worse, and as such should be prohibited.

Was the horse in front of us really a representation of a horse in a field, though?  Today, most kids encounter a horse as a toy long before the encounter one in real life, and the same is true with most stuffed animals: Helena loves frogs and bears and a moose and a couple of rabbits, and she has never seen any of them in real life.  Children don't really see their toys as representations of something else.  They are for play, not for representation.

The easy postmodern out (one much in fashion when I was in college, so much that I wrote my senior thesis on him) was the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, who theorized the simulacrum, understood as a "copy of which there is no original."  Epcot Center serves as a wonderful example of a simulacrum.  The difference, of course, is that Epcot claims to represent something (the "real" China across the water) and merely does it badly, and Baudrillard secretly desires for there to be an original in the background, and feels a little sad or nihilistic that there is no idea which the simulacrum can represent.  But a toy... it's different.  That a toy bear or frog represents its model poorly is no criticism: in fact, the toy can be much better for not appearing anything like its supposed reference.

There is pretty good evidence that the whole Platonic (and eventually Western and then almost-universal) obsession with representation emerges with money, which can stand for anything.  Coins (first established in the West by Midas in the 6th or 7th century BC), this strange new thing which can become anything in the process of exchange, open the question of representation, to which Platonic philosophy is only the first of many answers.  But many cultures, and all little kids, don't care about that.  Their word isn't governed by symbols and signs, but by the act of play (I reflect a lot on this on the book I wrote about child soldiers in Colombia).

To Helena, the whole question, raised by Plato and still at issue among analytic philosophers today, just doesn't matter.  She just wants to play on the horse.  And honestly, I think that's a much better philosophical position than almost all of the philosophers of language I've read...