and Joas, who all (in their quite different ways) want to emphasize creativity (Thrift
1999), who all (in their quite different ways) want to privilege the power of the
imagination.
In turn, this lack of attention to creativity makes it difficult to understand certain
kinds of expressive action. In particular, a whole category of social and cultural
action, usually termed play, is unable to be grasped. Play is a process of performa-
tive experiment: ‘The ongoing, underlying process of off-balancing, loosening,
bending, twisting, reconfiguring, and transforming the permeating, eruptive/
disruptive energy and mood below, behind and to the side of focused attention’
(Schechner 1993: 4 3) which is brought into focus by body-practices such as dance
and which ‘encourages the discovery of new configurations and twists of ideas and
experience’ (Schechner 1993: 4 2). It is the world of the ‘enacted subjunctive’
(Sutton-Smith 199 7 ), the world where possibilities are acted out. It is, in other
words
a mode, not a distinctive behavioural category.... play is viewed as an attitude
or frame that can be adopted towards anything....[It] occurs at a logical
level different from that it qualifies....play is functional because it teaches
about contexts; it teaches about frames not being at the same level as the acts
they contain.
(Schwartzman 19 7 8: 169)Such meta-communication presupposes fantasy produced through intersubjec-
tivity, and is characterized by quirkiness, redundancy, and oddity. It is, in other
words, about producing variation.
Re-timing space and re-spacing time
Another element of the non-representational interpretation of the event is the
refiguring of space and time. Given the aforegoing account of signification,
what we find is that notions of space and time need to be radically refigured. To
begin with, it is clear that there are multiple spaces and times, not one Newtonian
grid.
Time and space are not the Newtonian sensoria in which events occur and
planets fall along ellipses. But neither are they forms of our perception, the
unreal a prioris that our mind has to use in order to have or accommodate
the multiplicity of beings and entities. Far from being primitive terms, they
are, on the contrary, consequences of the ways in which both relate to one
another. We must therefore link our meditation on time to a third tradition,
the Leibnizian, which considers space and time as expressing some relation
between the entities themselves. But instead of a single space-time, we
will generate as many spaces and times as there are types of relations. Thus,
progressing along jungle trails will not produce the same space-times as
moving along [modern transport] networks...Afterwords 119