Playing the Game

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I set out a way of understanding the complex interconnectivity of practices, so that playing could be understood as part of a complex set of relations and connections, which I have described in relation to the three-fold approach to affect developed in Chapter 2 and the Deleuzian concept of the assemblage. If, in Latour’s sense, we look for the associative links, I have also argued that these associations are also brought into any game play by the temporal relations into which the participants have entered. Freud understood chains of association as producing the links of the unconscious, so that those associations are always being made. In that sense, just as Lacanians argued that the psychic work of masculinity is never accomplished and has to be ceaselessly reworked, so the affective work of masculinity is constantly invoked through the associative links in the game play. We should expect gender relations to be constantly reworked and invoked as I have shown in previous chapters.