139 - Redefining Seriousness (Showmanship & Play 21 of 30)

What makes something "serious" and why do we automatically equate seriousness with importance? In this thought-provoking journey through linguistic history, educational systems, and cultural hierarchies, Captain Frodo reveals how the very concept of seriousness has been weaponized as a tool for social control.

Diving into Alan White's groundbreaking essay "The Dismal Sacred Word," we discover how the first dictionaries deliberately created distinctions between "high" and "low" language, with lasting consequences for how we value different forms of expression. The exploration continues through the Protestant-influenced school systems that physically separated "serious" indoor learning from "unimportant" outdoor play—a division that continues to shape our understanding of value today.

From the marginalization of play to the struggles of artists seeking legitimacy, this episode exposes how arbitrary yet powerful these distinctions really are. Why did the Impressionists have to fight so hard to be taken seriously? Why do circus performers and magicians still battle for cultural recognition? The answer lies in understanding that "there is no intrinsic link at all" between solemn seriousness and genuine importance.

For anyone who has felt their passions dismissed as trivial or unimportant, this episode offers both validation and liberation. By recognizing how seriousness has been socially constructed, we can begin questioning these false hierarchies and reclaiming the profound value of play, joy, and creative expression. What if the most important things in life aren't serious at all?

Listen now to challenge everything you thought you knew about what really matters, and discover why play might be the most serious business of all.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to Way of the Showman
• 2:15 Who Decides What's Serious?
• 7:25 Dictionaries: Codifying High and Low Language
• 17:35 Schools and the Reproduction of Seriousness
• 33:50 The Fight To Be Taken Seriously
• 42:20 No Intrinsic Link Between Serious and Important

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

And greetings fellow travelers, and welcome to the way of the showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo and I will be your host and your guide along the way. And looking at the world through the lens of showmanship, it just means that if you take what you do and you're a showman and you're a performer and I yet again I just apologize for the gendered nature of that word, but it fits my thinking so well and it evolved out of me actually just thinking about it as myself and relating to myself. But now I see that. So I just want to remind everyone that even though I am saying man, show man in here, I'm thinking of it in the archaic kind of use of the word as man, when that used to mean mankind and all of that. And I do frequently throughout the thing say show folk instead of show man and I say performers or whatever. But I have a love-hate relationship with it because the words and I passed this asunder and into detail in our second season, so you can go back there and hear all about it. But it just means to view the world through the lens of showmanship. It means taking what we do so seriously that we can use it to understand the rest of the world, and at the moment we are deep into it. In fact, we're at 21 episodes. This is the 21st episode where we talk about play and as we talk about the nature of play and its relations to showmanship, I hope that your relationship to showmanship is deepening and deepening and that it sparks off ideas and that it sparks off thoughts that showmanship as a way in life can absolutely be a foundation for a philosophy and a valid way for being in the world. So last episode we talked about adults who play for a living and what that actually meant.

Speaker 1: 2:26

One of the key things that we talked about last time was the corrupting power of money and the corrupting power of power and the antidote to that was brought to us by Alan Watts, the Zen master jester crazy wise character, alan Watts, and he's from a talk where he talks about what would you do if money was no object, and that should be a topic for contemplation for anyone who does any kind of meditation or contemplative reading or thinking. You should be thinking about that. What would you do if money was no object? What is actually your true will? We spoke briefly about that we mentioned Aleister Crowley and we talked in all sorts of ways around and about these things and made an argument for why the kid actually is the man. And then we decided, oh no, we didn't actually decide. We started to look into the very first kind of introduction to the idea of who decides what's serious. So that's where we left it last time.

Speaker 1: 3:42

I did a bunch of talking about explorers and all that and how money always seemed to annoy me when it got introduced in these books that were so boring. So we talked about what serious is and we just talked about that very sort of first little step of it, looking at what the Google dictionary says, and I ended up by asking, like, if only what's solemn, boring and tragic is deemed serious, like why is that? So we're going to pick up the thread there today and look at the work of the thinker and critic Alan White, and so yeah, without further ado, let's just jump straight into the world of ideas. That further ado, let's just jump straight into the world of ideas. So who decides what's serious? So to get at this, we are going to go a circuitous path. We are going to talk about a few different things and we're going to start by talking about language and a difference between high and low language. So what the crack is that?

Speaker 1: 4:51

So, to shed some light on the dominance of the serious, of what, who decides of what the serious is and how that became to dominate, I will draw heavily on the work of one particular essay In Alan White's essay that's called the Dismal Sacred Word. The dismal sacred word it's not easy to say that comes from a collection of essays and reviews and stuff that he wrote, criticism that's called Carnival Hysteria and Writing from 1993. And he traces the reasons for this, the dominance of seriousness and what that meant. He traces it all the way back to the first dictionaries. So the very first dictionary of the English language is Robert Cordray's A Table Alphabetical from 1604, which expresses its purpose to be the elevation and edification of women and other unsophisticated unfortunates, as Mr Cordray puts it. Quote for the benefit of and help of ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskillful persons, whereby they may more easily and better understand many hard English words which they shall hear or read in scriptures. So yeah, the purpose is to allow the unskilled access to the serious and important matters discussed in sermons or in the conversations of gentlemen. So you can see, it's already off to a great start here. This origin of the unskillful is perhaps a noble pursuit, even if its language is expressing a certain lack of decorum.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Expected of a gentleman writer today, a list of words that will allow people to get a better understanding of language surely is innocent enough, or is it, as it turns out? Alan White does not think so. Is it, as it turns out? Alan White does not think so. It is already implicit in the first dictionary's creation that there is a higher language which the lower classes can only aspire to. This higher and harder language is more serious than common language. This is, per definition, the language used when talking about important matters.

Speaker 1: 7:47

And to ram this point home, white cites a lineage of dictionaries of slang and vulgar languages of vagabonds, thieves and common people used when they buy and sell their wares. So the first of these slang dictionaries, as we might call it today, of Kant or slang, was published in 1567. So Kant is a term that sort of means slang. I hadn't heard it before. I read it in this essay. So the first of these was published in 1567. So it was actually published then, before Mr Cordray's excellent list of table alphabetical. But be that as it may, about 100 years later, this dictionary of Kant and slang that was published in 1567, a hundred years later, another writer of a Kant or slang dictionary called Elisha Coles described the aim and value of his list book as quote it may chance to save your throat from being cut or at least your pocket from being picked.

Speaker 1: 9:09

So there you go and there you have it. Best learn this low language, because those who speak like this are murderers and thieves. It's pretty straightforward the reason to learn the low language was to better protect yourself from the beastly behaviors of the vulgar vagabonds. Not to be able to learn the hard words of the common people and thereby get to experience the world as they see it, or learn what's in their heart, since whatever it is, whatever is, want to be found there in their hearts. You don't want to. It's trivial and of little value. So the reason why you learn a low language is, of course, just to stay safe and not be killed or have your pocket picked, whilst to learn the high language and the hard words is to get at the heart of existence and get to understand the serious matters.

Speaker 1: 10:09

So dictionaries have thereby, from the very beginning, alan White argues, they've created a separation of a high and a low language. One elevates you to understanding, if not really inviting you into the conversation, of the spiritual and other refined matters, and the other can at best have the value of saving you from the savagery of brutes. And in this, the men who penned the dictionaries made themselves the arbiters of what was high and low. They placed a value on certain words and ways of speaking and, to quote Alan White, quote what in fact is happening in this distinction between two kinds of language is the creation of a hierarchy by the higher language such that seriousness, what is to be taken serious, is defined literally in its own words. These dictionaries encoded, in their very form, a decisive ideological maneuver. They installed in the very heart of language not only a distinction on the grounds of seriousness, in the very heart of language, not only a distinction on the grounds of seriousness, but the very principle of seriousness itself.

Speaker 1: 11:33

Words and things in themselves are never serious nor comic, but the ability, the power to legislate what shall be deemed serious is a key to hegemonic control. End quote. Hmm, whoever decides what's serious, they have full control over everything. They're controlling the language that we use to express things and the very hierarchy of existence. So the guys who wrote the books, these dictionaries that we talked about, the Kant slang dictionary and list alphabetical they used well, even the guy who wrote the slang one said used high language to define what was valuable or serious, thus important, and they basically codified the distinction and the hierarchical polarization of high and low, or serious and comic. The books on non-standard English suggested a further use for the book, which is that writers can use these words to create characters who could provide quote light relief in drama, poetry and fiction. End quote the slang or Kant dictionaries contains the particular language of the silly, unimportant, not serious and frivolous. The project of mapping language in dictionaries began a process not just dictating what's important, but that common language could not express anything serious or important at all.

Speaker 1: 13:11

What's worth serious attention are the things expressed in the high language. Per definition, and Democracy 101 says that we should never have the lawgiver those who makes the rules, be the one who enforces them, whilst, as we see, when it comes to language, these were one and the same. White calls this the social reproduction of seriousness. He talks about that quite a bit the social reproduction of seriousness. How seriousness is socially reproduced? Yeah, well, I just said that in another way to try to clarify it, but didn't really add anything anyway. Where any given culture guides its members towards what it has deemed to be serious and thus important, how about that Better? So now let's look at schools and this social reproduction of seriousness. It takes a little bit to get your head around that idea, but it's basically about how society will just reproduce and slowly change or whatever. Whatever they think is serious. So serious is just a word or a category, but there is a social construction of what gets put in the category of seriousness. So the dictionaries are just one example of how a select group of people within a society amplifies and codifies certain ideas.

Speaker 1: 14:49

And we know from indigenous people and hunter-gatherer bands that the way we have hierarchically structured what's important is not the only way to see the world, nor is it the best way necessarily. Is it the best way necessarily? We in the so-called Western world have had this structure of high and low imprinted on us from a long history of haves and have-nots. Western history has always had huge disparities of wealth and opportunity. Landowners, noblemen, monarchs, factory owners and merchants have in many ways functioned like a whole other class of human beings and puns aside, the development of culture for the rich and powerful affords completely different insights and topics of interest and modes of inquiry and understanding of the world than those of a serf bound to work on their lord's estate, and these people were practically owned by their lord. I don't know what the technicality was, but a serf was pretty much owned by the lord that owned the land that they were working.

Speaker 1: 15:56

So it's then not strange that what's deemed high culture, high language, thus serious and important, are the concerns and affairs of the rich and powerful, and that these things, almost per definition, would lie beyond the interest or even the ability of comprehension for the general population. One way that this was done was through the use of hard words and difficult language. I'll just add here that whenever I say hard, I'm using the original spelling from this book, which is H-A-R-D-E hard words. So on the page it's quite clear that it's a particular kind of hard words and that it's in quotation marks, anyway, anyway. So one way that this was done this keeping things out of interest or the ability of comprehension for the general population was to use these hard words and difficult language, but not just through using hard and often words that are borrowed from Latin, greek or French, but actually having the religious and scientific discourse happen in a different language altogether, which back in those days was Latin. And another powerful influence on people was religion, and this part that I'm going into now. We're sort of swapping, with the main source having been Alan White's the Dismal Sacred Word to now being Peter Gray's book Free to Learn, which we've talked about before, and this is the chapter Free to Learn that's called why Schools Are what they Are, why Schools Are what they Are, from Peter Gray's Free to Learn.

Speaker 1: 17:48

Now, through the Middle Ages, it was Catholicism that reigned supreme in Western Europe, and they preached a clear structure of authority, from God to Pope, to bishops and then priests, to commoners and peasants at the very bottom, in a system remarkably similar to the feudal system. The church did their ceremonies and sermons in Latin, and to be able to learn Latin you would have to be accepted into the church's universities. These institutions were not about the free inquiry of its students, but rather about making sure that those who now could read Scripture and understand what the priests said were well on board with how to interpret what they read and heard in the right way. For the Catholics, the way to understand the Bible was dictated by the church. The Bible was pretty much the key thing that people were reading. I mean, they were reading a little bit of. Who were they reading? Maybe Thomas Aquinas and whatever? These early universities were all about guiding the students towards the right doctrine.

Speaker 1: 19:01

Now things changed quite a bit in Europe with the coming of the Protestantism. Martin Luther and John Calvin and others started the reformation of religion, and for us here today, the key difference was that each Christian now had a personal relationship directly with God, mediated and, importantly, mediated by the word as it was written in the bible. Each person was responsible for interpreting god's word, and this was hard work and nigh on impossible, as long as the word of god was only available in a different high, hard language. So already in 1534, before both of those books that we named by age the List Alphabetical and the Slang Dictionary that would save your life or save your throat from being cut. So in 1534, martin Luther translated what became known as the Luther Bible, not from Latin, but from the original Hebrew and Greek. So once the Bible existed in a language that people could understand, then the next hurdle was that they needed to be able to read it. People needed to learn how to read. Luther was well aware of this, and soon there were schools popping up left, right and centre to promote the Protestant Reformation's take on Christianity.

Speaker 1: 20:33

The structure and form of these schools necessarily reflected the Protestant work ethic. People were themselves responsible for getting into a right relationship to God, which meant that they were themselves responsible for their own success or failure and their own salvation or damnation. To achieve this, they themselves needed to work hard life as serious for rich and poor alike, and they all needed to apply themselves. And the work was never done. It comes as no surprise that the learning offered in these schools were about as far from play as you can imagine. Play as you can imagine. John Wesley, who lived from 1703 to 1791, confirmed this in no uncertain terms in his rules for the Wesleyan schools. Quote as we have no play days, so neither do we allow any time for play on any day, for he that plays as a child will play as a man, end quote. So there you have it. Lessons were mainly rote memorization and were, I would imagine, almost deliberately boring, taxing and tedious for the children, as working hard was seen as a virtue. So by making sure there was no enjoyment involved, you benefited double. You learned scripture and it was hard which was good for you To make this happen.

Speaker 1: 22:04

Corporal punishment was administered, often vigorously. The school as we know it was heavily influenced by the particular kind of system that was set up by the German theologian, pietist and pedagogue, august Hermann Frank. He lived from 1663 to 1727 and he created a standard curriculum. So there you go, that's an interesting development. And he required teachers to go through a certain training so as to teach in a uniform manner, and he introduced the concept of time. Every classroom became equipped with an hourglass and from then on the learning was dictated by time. He also changed the rules on corporal punishment so that a child was no longer supposed to be beaten with rod, cane ruler or blows with the hand ruler or blows with the hand, blows to the head, blows to the mouth for mistakes in reciting their lessons. But they could be beaten with all these things for misbehavior. But you couldn't be beaten. So they were still going to be beaten, but the reasons for the beatings had changed and I guess for the times back then I guess that was an improvement. You gotta take what you can when you get it, I guess. So this make it seems like as if Mr Frank was on the right track.

Speaker 1: 23:29

But he did also believe that the most important task for the school was to curb the will of the child and make them obedient. Quote the formation of the child and make them obedient. Quote the formation of the child's character involves the will as well as the understanding. Above all, it is necessary to break the natural willfulness of the child, while the schoolmaster who seeks to make the child more learned is to be commended for cultivating the child's understanding. But he has not done enough. So the most effective way to achieve this he believed Mr Frank, the one with the time and all of this it was by constant monitoring and supervision. At all costs the children and youth had to be saved from their own whims and inclinations, as these invariably led to sinful behavior. And here we really see how enjoyment or individual inner motivation is being willfully vilified. The codification of the serious and the sinful or wasteful is now well on the way.

Speaker 1: 24:50

As schools and schooling were taken over by the state, the focus didn't change all that much. In America, the first compulsory school started in Massachusetts in 1852, and it came later in the UK, as there the powerful players of the Industrial Revolution fought very hard to keep the children in the factories, mills and mines. So there in England the compulsory schooling arrives slowly over about 20 years, starting in 1870. I just when I remember when I was reading this and found the start of it in Peter Gray's book and I started reading around on finding articles about it. It's just, it's amazing. It's like America had compulsory schooling and the whole thing with children in the mines and in the mills, that literally the industry just fought against needing to put children in schools. It's the same as when people go oh, it turns out smoking is bad, and then the industry is just fighting against it. And in hindsight you go yeah, well, there was that 20 years when they were we should put kids in schools and people who owned the mines were going oh, but the children, we need them. They're so small and nimble, they fit into the small holes in the mine.

Speaker 1: 26:15

Anyway, in the state-run schools, children were no longer just needing to subordinate themselves to God, but also needed to become good citizens in the state. You know, this means that they needed to accept that a very large proportion of life was centered around doing stuff that you didn't particularly want to do. You needed to be punctual, follow orders, accept and comply with authority and to not question neither what was taught nor the method used for teaching it. So it's clear from this brief and possibly biased, but nonetheless accurate, I believe, history of schools that the most important features were not so much whatever was taught but the ability to fit into society and accept whatever you were presented with as necessarily serious and important. It was in it, like it was in school. So whatever it was in school, so whatever it was that was being taught, it was in school, so it was per definition serious.

Speaker 1: 27:24

And this is where I return to the work of Alan White in his Dismal Sacred Word essay. I don't know if I start talking about that later, of where I found that in that story, but I mentioned it at the end of last episode. But anyway, alan White points out wonderfully how the separation between what's unimportant distraction and what's deemed to be unimportant distraction and what's serious and important is imprinted on kids by the very architecture of the experience. We've talked about this many episodes ago. I mentioned it a little bit when he says the important activities, which is the learning and the curriculum decided by church or state. That is what happens inside the classroom, whilst the unimportant, the blowing off steam stuff happens outdoors.

Speaker 1: 28:22

This separation of inside and outside is fundamental in the social reproduction of seriousness. A huge effort is mounted by teachers and assistants in keeping the playground behavior out of the classrooms. In Norway we have the concept of an inside voice. If any kid is loud cheering with excitement in the classroom, or in any other room for that matter, an adult might say remember to use your inside voice. And just like that all the fun and enthusiasm is drained out of the situation and play belongs outside, if it belongs anywhere at all. And if John Wesley had his way, then there would be quote no play on any day. End quote. But as it is, play is allowed, but only for short intervals in between the important stuff that happens in the classroom, only for short intervals in between the important stuff that happens in the classroom.

Speaker 1: 29:22

It is baked into every aspect of schooling that what happens inside the classroom is important and what happens outside is unimportant. The serious business happens inside and what happens outside is not serious, as Alan White puts it not. And we have in schools the exact same process of the institution itself deciding what is serious and thus worthy of careful consideration, as we saw in those early dictionaries which is why Mr White starts with talking about dictionary first and he says it is not just that children are socialized into accepting the difference between work and play, it is in the daily and he says institutional norm and a ruling idea. So that's this kind of the social reproduction of seriousness. It's that what is being taught inside and the whole system around it just makes us accept that what's going on in there is serious, the issues that are being talked about, that what's going on in there is serious, the issues that are being talked about, like the fact that we talk about Napoleon but not somebody else who lived in that time, and that somehow, then, is history, is more serious than art, history or whatever. So for us who have now looked in detail at all the benefits of play, we see that the claim that play is not serious and not valuable is demonstrably false.

Speaker 1: 31:23

There is a huge amount of learning that happens in the playground. Some, like Peter Gray, argues that what's learned there in the playground is in fact the most important learning that happens in the school. There are songs, secrets, jokes, games, riddles, physical skills, social skills and even academic skills that are shared and learned in the schoolyard, in every recess. All these elements are deliberately and at a great effort, kept outside the classrooms, outside and unsupervised, to the extent that even recess is unsupervised these days. The children finally get to work, because play is the child's work. They get to work through the most fundamental form of learning play Finally a stolen moment for them to do their work.

Speaker 1: 32:16

As we've seen, it makes a whole lot of sense to equate play with learning, and I have already argued that play is the child's work, thus important for them. So why is it then being kept out of the classroom? And I don't advocate games and play to be brought into the classroom to replace what's going on there, as this would kind of defeat the purpose. A big part of why play is deemed unimportant is the fundamental misapplication of importance to what society has deemed to be important. I understand what they mean when they talk about seriousness and I agree that this is a certain kind of knowledge and that it has great value. And what I'm having a problem with is how it is equated with importance, because there is no intrinsic link between seriousness and importance. There is no intrinsic link between seriousness and important what happens inside a classroom. I can see why they call that serious, but why that is important and why the play that's going on outside or the play that I do, why that is not important. That bit is what I'm questioning.

Speaker 1: 33:32

All that's deemed not serious, like dancing and painting and role-playing and running in the forest and organizing informal football matches, selecting teams and deciding on rules to make the game fun for the little ones and handicap the stronger players to make the game more fun, playing hide-and-seek and so forth it all teaches immensely important lessons that will go on to define each individual child to a much greater degree than the trigonometry of the European history taught inside the classroom, and we know this from studies. There is science to back this up, but it's very hard and it takes a long time to turn people's conceptions around of what's important. It just made me think now that one of the things that I mentioned it earlier, many episodes ago, that my daughter is bilingual and that that was my responsibility to teach her norwegian, me being norwegian and all and um, that we spoke to this nurse and she sort of said oh, you know, you have to force her to speak, speak norwegian because she my daughter would understand Norwegian but would answer in English. It's an easy, easier option to just answer in one language, because it's clear that I understand it, because I understood when my wife spoke to me. So my daughter put two and two together.

Speaker 1: 34:51

And then another thing that the nurse said she child maternal nurse. She said that the kids will adapt their accents and they will take their speaking patterns and the language more readily from their peers. They are more influenced by their peers than their parents. So I just thought of that here now, because that's another sort of thing that the language that they learn. A kid that grows up might speak completely without an accent, whilst the immigrants, such as myself, when I'm in Australia, even don't. Yeah, my daughter speaks English or Australian English without an accent and she speaks Norwegian completely without an accent. She takes it from me, but she also adapts it to the people around her and she tweaks her dialect. The dialect changed when we moved here. So there you go. People pick up a lot more, which is why it's so important that you know, or why parents try to control.

Speaker 1: 36:04

I can't remember who was that said that. It's like if you take the average of the people that you hang out with. That's sort of the place where you will end up, in a sense, that's why it's good to have good people around you. Anyway, that was the digression. Let's take the fight, uh, to be serious. So, each branch of art, um so, because we all fight to be taken serious, or whatever, each branch of art have fought their own battles to become respectable and be recognized as serious art, because we all want to be, you know, we all want to be in the serious category.

Speaker 1: 36:48

So how hard it was for the Impressionists to break free from the French Academy of Fine Art. The Academy was a national institution that oversaw the training of artists as well as the artistic standards for France. It controlled what French artists studied, what French art could look like and who could be entrusted with such a noble responsibility as being an artist. So they organized the only serious, thus important exhibition in France. If you were not accepted by this state-sponsored exhibition, which they called the Salon, if you didn't get chosen by the jury, which, of course, were steeped in the teachings and trappings of what the Academy deemed serious, proper art, you could not build a reputation as a serious artist, which again meant that you couldn't make a living. So in today's art world, where anything goes as long as a gallery or an artist can sell it, or even if it can't be sold, it's hard to get one's head around just how powerful this French Academy of Art was. Only it, only it, only it decided what was serious art.

Speaker 1: 38:08

It took the concerted effort of August Renoir, claude Monet, edouard Degas and many others who pooled their money and hired a studio where they presented their own exhibition, to begin to break this systemic hierarchy, and the whole idea of an independent exhibition salon was scandalous at the time. An independent exhibition what are you talking about? This is crazy. So today, when we look at Monet's water lilies, we rarely think about how hard he fought to be taken seriously. Despite his tenacity, monet didn't ever get accepted by the French society and he could barely sustain himself by selling his paintings. And nowadays you can't get a Monet painting for under 2 million US dollars, and his major works go for more than 100 million US dollars, and his major works go for more than 100 million US dollars.

Speaker 1: 39:04

So for us circus performers, magicians and show folk we fight, and our fight continues to this day. We fight for the public to take our art form seriously and not just as something that's good for the killing of time and good for the children. We fight to get schools to teach our art and craft so that we can be at least sidelined with modern dance, ballet, film, acting, painting and sculpture as something worthy, serious and careful study. We still fight to be taken seriously so that we can do what we do actually can become important. We still fight to be taken seriously so that what we do can become important, even though I know it's important and you know it's important. But we're trying to change the public's opinion and take us seriously. Ah, it's just a magician, it's great for the children. And then you see someone like Danny Doughty or you see Penn and Teller or you see Nick DeFat and you're going like that stuff there. It's much good for, maybe good for the children, but it is good for everyone.

Speaker 1: 40:20

So let's look at the value of play in itself. Picking up on what I said about not advocating free play to take over the classroom, a big part of this is that I just don't see it as possible in the way that schools are structured today. When play is taken into the classroom, it is as a tool that can be used to teach something important. It has no value in itself. It's only the sugar on the spoon that makes the medicine go down.

Speaker 1: 40:53

And in this way, taking play into the classroom does exactly the opposite of what it should. It is not allowing for free play to teach in its own deeply important way. Instead, it takes play and uses it as a Trojan horse to invade or colonize the kingdom of childhood. They take the children's greatest treasure, their most precious mode of being, and then they twist it into the purpose of reproducing the official line on what's serious and important, to the purpose of reproducing the official line on what's serious and important. Teachers with the best intentions tell their class that today we're going to play shop and the purpose of the playing is to learn about the wonderful benefits of capitalism as a stabilizing force in the world. And right there we see that what the teacher is proposing is, by the definitional criteria of play, not play. It's neither self-motivated for the children nor is it done for its own sake. Nothing in school is done for the sheer pleasure of doing it. It's all done for another reason, and a big part of which is to be memorized and then presented on a test, the score of which will have a powerful impact on what you can or can't do in the future. So the social reproduction of seriousness is a fundamental, and perhaps the fundamental hegemonic maneuver.

Speaker 1: 42:15

Alan White says so whomever is in the position of dominance, who's able to specify what is and isn't to be taken seriously, has a power which is supremely difficult to topple, as it is them who dictates whether your art, craft or even the language you use is indeed worthy of being taken seriously. They have to have the power to remove your agency. They have to have the power to remove your agency, much like how the state, via certain institutions, can deem their citizens not able to take their own decisions. Like a psychiatrist can legally disempower someone so that they have to ask their guardian for permission to buy a new computer or the like. This can happen to adults and in an instant, whatever they say does not have any real value. Their language, their ways of expressing themselves, has become like the babbling of a child. There might be something to it, but it's up to the guardian to decipher what's important, since, per definition, what the legally disempowered is saying does not have to be taken as serious.

Speaker 1: 43:25

So this is why the current work of so-called circademics, people who are writing serious papers, books and PhDs about circus. They're all fighting the fight for the practical, physical circus performers, the circus scholars and the scholars of entertainment history, game studies and magic studies are writing in the high language about the low arts, so that the high will be able to see the value in the low, because in itself a circus show or a magic show does not speak. The language thus remains unintelligible for the scholars of high culture. And my hope is that at some point, the work of the serious thinkers and those like myself engaged in low-brow public scholarship will manage to show enough depth and ways that circus, magic and its allied arts can contribute uniquely to the cultural conversation. As the creative processes of artists like you and me, who manifest circus in new and interesting ways, continues, the work itself will be a powerful convincer of the masses that showmanship is serious business. Indeed, I mean, we are the ones that do it and together with the real scholars, people who are actually writing scientific papers for the academies to read it's all slowly just tipping it in and you know, in University in Stockholm and all this, people like Eric Aubrey who is doing his PhD in juggling, when these things exist. When these papers and books get published, then it does all just build and slowly the art will. Eventually someone will go.

Speaker 1: 45:17

Yeah, it might just lift us, but Alan White's paper on the conflation of the serious with the important has been like a white whale for me. And here it comes. This is how I actually got onto this paper that I've talked in detail about. So the paper itself has actually been eluding me since I first became aware of its existence in Bruce Caron's book Inside the Live Reptile Tent the Twilight World of the Carnival, midway from 2001,. As that's almost 20 years ago, and only in preparation for writing this did I manage to find out-of-print book where the paper the dismal, sacred word was reprinted.

Speaker 1: 46:01

I could have shared more about dictionaries and gone on at serious length about seriousness, but from having the idea that there is no intrinsic link between seriousness and importance implanted in me by glimpsing it in a chapter in another book, it has grown in importance for me. So I would like to share one final quote by Mr Alan White, which I learnt upon reading this book that he was taken from the world much too soon, losing a battle with leukemia, which only connects him closer to my heart, as I have been a more lucky combatant in that battle, and the quote goes there is an ambiguity at the heart of seriousness, which all the high language takes advantage of. The serious is at once that which excludes pleasurable laughter and that which is felt to be important. In fact, of course, there is no intrinsic link at all between these two things. Many solemn occasions and activities are utterly trivial, just as many laughable incidents are important. Seriousness, as the exclusion of laughter, has much more to do with rituals of power and control than with thoughts intrinsically or essentially important. So you might now know more about dictionaries and all high and low language than you ever wanted to know. But if you are just going to take away one thing from this episode, it is just that what's serious and what's important. There's no link between those two other than what we actually make up. Seriousness is a category and we are fighting to be included in it with what we do here now.

Speaker 1: 47:55

And I hope that you have enjoyed this, because for me, this little story of how I then ended up finding this book and there's more details of how I found it in one place, because if you're going to buy this thing it's hundreds of dollars. But then for some reason, I found it in a place and blah, blah, blah, and then I read it and when I first started reading the thing and it was only talking about dictionaries I went, ah, not only is this a white whale, it's like when I get it, it's just all puffed up air or so. But then it started to swap into this language of schools and the inside and the outside and all that and I felt like, ah, it was all worth it. And I was reading this when I mentioned before that when the Happy Side Show was making a show with Derek Ives Actually, that show never actually happened, but we were doing a creative development or so and I was reading it and finding the language of Bruce Caron there in that book just to be wonderful.

Speaker 1: 48:58

But there was this one phrase there that there's no intrinsic link between seriousness and importance. That's just been mulling over in my head and now that I have found it, then who would have thought that 20 years later, I would make a whole episode about this? And I really hope that there are a few of you out there who will enjoy these obscure but powerful arguments. I think for the importance of play and the importance of what we do as a serious thing. So if you know anyone who's writing a PhD, if you know anyone who's interested in the history of dictionaries, or interested in play and showmanship, who's interested in what it is that we're talking about here, then please point the wheel a direction share something on your instagram, share something on facebook. That's my hope that you're going to do that until I speak to you again. So until then, take care of yourself, and I hope to see you along the way.