Desire, Society, and Playing

I said in my last post that we need to learn to invest our body -- the locus of our activities -- into the social field. What is meant by the social field? It should come to no surprise that we are all social beings. We are born social. As infants, not only are we introduced to others, but others form the way we see ourselves. And as infants we connect ourselves to others. The baby laughs and smiles and grabs and bites and sucks. Other objects and other people. As we grow older, we grow more curious: we wish to connect ourselves to the world, whether it be in different or similar ways. We are constantly interacting with others. Indeed, our words, our thoughts, our actions -- they operate in a context that is dependent on the other.

So we always operate within a social field. This social field is the field where desire both operates and is cut off from operating, disconnected or drawn away into a different direction. It is a field where living (which always implies living with others) can be thought. And different ways of living can be thought. Always a multiplicity. I want to live differently. To be sure, we cannot view desire as being so sharply disconnected from pleasure or enjoyment. We commonly have this image of desire as something prior to pleasure or "satisfaction." But there is a certain joy in desiring and a certain joy in seeing the world in new ways. This may be what we call "playing." When children play, they imagine different possibilities of living and acting and they connect their world to these different ways of living. As a result, they create a mode of existence in which they play. In this way, toys and clothes are not simply representations of another life, one that they fantasize about living, but means of imagining another way of life and consequently performing in this imagination.

We are not much different from children in this respect. We imagine ways of living and in our imagining perform certain activities. We understand ourselves to be doing something based on this imagination. This imagination is the work of desire and is inherently social. That is, it inherently deals with the other; it needs to be validated or countersigned by another. The other makes my imagination real to me, and my desires work off of my relationship with the other. Therefore, I propose that investing desire into the social field is the work of imaginaing our relationships with others -- people, animals, environments, the world.