Benjamin on Toys, Play, and the Joy of Repetition

By joneilortiz on January 22, 2009

http://www.mutuallyoccluded.com/2009/01/benjamin-on-toys-play-and-the-joy-of-repetition/ The alabaster bosom that seventeenth-century poets celebrated in their poems was to be found only in dolls, whose fragility often cost them their existence. Walter Benjamin, Cultural History of Toys 115
Taken together, three short essays by Walter Benjamin on the subject of toys outline a novel approach to the cultural meaning of toys, the forms of play they inculcate, and the imaginations and desires they help to shape. In Toys and Play, the most provocative piece of the three, Benjamin begins by foregrounding the cultural process by which a child comes to understand that a given cult implement is to be regarded as a plaything. Which is not to say that the toy is strictly an imposed instrument of subjectification; on the contrary, it is the childs imagination that does the work of conversion. For who gives the child his toys if not adults? And even if he retains a certain power to accept or reject them, a not insignificant proportion of the oldest toys (balls, hoops, tops, kites) are in a certain sense imposed on him as cult implements that became toys only afterward, partly through the childs powers of imagination . (Benjamin Toys and Play 118) Benjamin, however, takes this one step further and posits that not only is the toy culturally constructed, but so is the child through the toy implement and the whole practice of playing. The concept of a child itself of a child as fundamentally distinct from an adult is relatively new, he reminds us, and did not emerge until the nineteenth century. It is well known that even childrens clothing became emancipated from that of adults only at a very late date. Not until the nineteenth century, in fact. It sometimes looks as if our century wishes to take this development one step further and, far from regarding children as little men and women, has reservations about thinking of them as human beings at all. (Benjamin Old Toys 101) The toy and the child who plays with it were not simply constructed out of thin air, however. Broad historical conditions prepared their emergence, directly and indirectly. The toy industry itself emerged, as it were, as a side-effect of the decline of the Church. The smaller art object oddities, curiosities, toys, themes which run throughout all of Benjamins work, was born from a displaced craft and artistry in search of employment. Benjamin describes this moment, in the wake of the Reformation, as preceding the separation of the adult curiosity from the childs toy. At around the same time, the advance of the Reformation forced many artists who had formerly worked for the Church to shift to the production of goods to satisfy the demand for craftwork, and to produce smaller art objects for domestic use, instead of large-scale works. This led to a huge upsurge in the production of the tiny objects that filled toy cupboards and gave such pleasure to children, as well as the collections of artworks and curiosities that gave such pleasure to adults. It was this that created the fame of Nuremberg and led to the hitherto unshaken dominance of German toys on the world market. (Benjamin Cultural History of Toys 114) Gradually, through a process of emancipation, the toy separated itself out from the crowd of small-works. This emancipation, however, was one of alienation and segmentation for the culture and for the family. The nineteenth century saw the unassuming, tiny, playful object disappear, while, in tandem, the child came to have his own playroom; thus, the toys were able to grow in size, becoming his property of sorts. The familys role in playing with the child receded accordingly, and an indulgent sentimentality generally overtook the toy, play, and the childs early development, especially with regards to books and reading. If we survey the entire history of toys, it becomes evident that the question of size has far greater importance than might have been supposed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the long-term decline in these things begins, we see toys becoming larger; the unassuming, the tiny, and the playful all slowly disappear. It was only then that children acquired a playroom of their own and a cupboard in which they could keep books separately from those of their parents. There can be no doubt that the older volumes with their small format called for the mothers presence, whereas the modern quartos with their insipid and indulgent sentimentality are designed to enable children to disregard her absence. The process of emancipating the toy begins. The more industrialization penetrates, the more it decisively eludes the control of the family and becomes increasingly alien to children and also to parents. (Benjamin Cultural History of Toys 114) Even so, Benjamin reserves an aesthetic-cultural appreciation for the technology and techniques that produced the toy, presumably during the early stages of the Reformation and before the full penetration of industrialization. Through the Church artisans, he links the production of the small work to folk art, which is often nothing more than the cultural goods of a ruling class that have trickled down and been given a new lease on life within the framework of a broad collective. In this

respect, the trickle down of an aesthetic from high to low is the intact process that industrial forces will soon penetrate and break up. For Benjamin, the toy is an important site of confrontation between two different models for the circulation of aesthetic, technique, and technology through a given culture. In the same way, the genuine and self-evident simplicity of toys was a matter of technology, not formalist considerations. For a characteristic feature of folk art the way in which primitive technology combined with cruder materials imitates sophisticated technology combined with expensive materials can be seen with particular clarity in the world of toys. Porcelain from the great czarist factories in Russian villages provided the model for dolls and genre scenes carved in wood. More recent research into folk art has long since abandoned the belief that primitive inevitably means older. Frequently, so-called folk art is nothing more than the cultural goods of a ruling class that have trickled down and been given a new lease on life within the framework of a broad collective. (Benjamin Toys and Play 119) With that said, Benjamin turns to describing a more encompassing theory of play, as it relates not only to toys themselves but also to more general aspects of life, adult or otherwise. The first point he makes is that the toy itself is not what produces play or at least it shouldnt (though it can). Indeed, for Benjamin, the less directed, determined, and purposeful the toy, the more available it is to imaginative play. A good toy should be as open-ended and undefined as possible Because the more appealing toys are, in the ordinary sense of the term, the further they are from genuine playthings; the more they are based on imitation, the further away they lead us from real, living play. (Benjamin Cultural History of Toys 115116) Instead of thinking of the toy as the cause of play, as what determines the game a child will play, Benjamin describes play as motivated first by actions and affects, of which specific toys are but the enablers or vehicles. This perhaps explains why children so frequently misuse toys, on the one hand, and turn non-toys into playthings, on the other. Today we may perhaps hope that it will be possible to overcome the basic error namely, the assumption that the imaginative content of a childs toys is what determines his playing; whereas in reality the opposite is true. A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into a robber or a policeman. (Benjamin Cultural History of Toys 115) Though scholars tend to focus on Benjamins characteristic mixture of materiality and spiritualism by which he imbues the small work, the popular, and the mundane with a spiritual force what is discussed less often is the role of desire and affection in his theory of the subject, which comes to the fore in his theory of play. For Benjamin, what is most important about the toy is not the toy itself, its design and history, though these are of course central to his analysis, but the action and impulse to which they are lent, or which they block and delimit. Indeed, in Toys and Play the theory of play and repetition that he outlines may be distinguished, in this respect, from some of the more predominant aesthetic theories of his time. In a paragraph rich with possibilities, he carefully distinguishes the childs imaginative repetition from major theories of the day the aesthetic theory of imitation, the Frankfurt Schools theory of escapism, the Freudian theory of trauma and melancholy even as he links it up with an irreducible pleasure, affection, and sexuality. In contrast to reactive, therapeutic, and derivational theories of repetition, Benjamins is characteristically affirmative and closely allied with desire, intensity, and the body. Last, such a study would have to explore the great law that presides over the rules and rhythms of the entire world of play: the law of repetition. We know that for a child repetition is the soul of play, that nothing gives him greater pleasure than to Do it again! The obscure urge to repeat things is scarcely less powerful in play, scarcely less cunning in its workings, than the sexual impulse in love. It is no accident that Freud has imagined he could detect an impulse beyond the pleasure principle in it. And in fact, every profound experience longs to be insatiable, longs for return and repetition until the end of time, and for the reinstatement of an original condition from which it sprang. All things would be resolved in a trice / If we could only do them twice. Children act on this proverb of Goethes. Except that the child is not satisfied with twice, but wants the same thing again and again, a hundred or even a thousand times. This is not only the way to master frightening fundamental experiences by deadening ones own response, by arbitrarily conjuring up experiences, or through parody; it also means enjoying ones victories and triumphs over and over again, with total intensity. An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a story. A child creates the entire event anew and starts again right from the beginning. Here, perhaps, is the deepest explanation for the two meanings of the German wordSpielen [which means 'to play' and 'games']: the element of repetition is what is actually common to them. Not a doing as if but a doing the same thing over and over again, the transformation of a shattering experience into habit that is the essence of play. (Benjamin Toys and Play 120) From there, Benjamin joins the childs love of repetition to habit and instruction, the basic processes by which a child is introduced to culture, routine, and the trials & tribulations of daily life. For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit. Eating, sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be instilled into the struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery rhymes. Habit enters life as a game, and in habit, even

in its most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end. Habits are the forms of our first happiness and our first horror that have congealed and become deformed to the point of being unrecognizable. (Benjamin Toys and Play 120) For Benjamin, play, which resists habit and routine, is also its mother and its shepherd. Through even the most rigid habits of adult life, he writes, an element of play and innovation invariably lingers. However, in a much darker sense, and here Benjamin deviates sharply from the more jubilant character of Derridas iteration, habits themselves are but the congealed, ossified forms of once-intense, almost-unrecognizable moments of intensity and feeling. If, for Benjamin, the most dreary habits of daily life must contain a smidgen of playfulness, its apparition is less the sign of a resilient subject than the haunting trace of a lost, remembered freedom. References Benjamin, Walter. The Cultural History of Toys, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Mrkisches Museum, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. Quotes of Note And it cannot be denied that we needed this encyclopedia of toys to revive discussion of the theory of play, which has not been treated in this context since Karl Groos published his important work Spiele der Menschen [People at Play] in 1899. Any novel theory would have to take account of the Gestalttheory of play gestures gestures of which Willy Haas recently listed (May 18, 1928) the three most important [cat and mouse, mother defending nest and young, struggle between animals]. (Benjamin Toys and Play 119) When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in childrens games and childrens books since the end of the war. (Benjamin Old Toys 100)