Introduction

This introductory chapter anticipates the issues raised by the contributors to Play, Philosophy and Performance and explores questions of performance and performativity in play and in play scholarship (philosophy of play and philosophy at play), providing context for and shaping the collection. In exploring play through lenses of performance and performativity, we consider the extent to which notions of play as metaphorical practice are undermined by its necessary creation of the conditions of its existence enhancing the radical potential of its eternal What If. This approach grounded in performance/performativity disrupts the boundary between play and non-play, while play’s participatory ordinariness and the continuous analysis required to keep it going means that its practice and evaluation necessarily accentuates the interpretive voices of its participants, undermining the distinction between players and analysts in play scholarship and challenging epistemological approaches and analytical frames. The overall case is that an analytical approach grounded in performance is incompatible with the binary modes of thinking central to instrumentalist views of play.