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Why look at toy animals? Play, protopolitics, and the postnatural

Why look at toy animals? Play, protopolitics, and the postnatural
Why look at toy animals? Play, protopolitics, and the postnatural
This article addresses the toy as a neglected cultural and technical object. The toy is neither tool nor ritual object, and its animation in children’s imaginative play suggests alternative perspectives on the history and lived experience of material and technological artefacts. The concept of protopolitics is advanced to explore the implications for cultural politics of the ambiguous articulation of power relationships in play. The article takes the long history of the toy animal as a case study, drawing attention to its creaturely-artificial facets that go beyond, or more accurately precede, familiar cultural-political binaries of authentic and inauthentic, depth and surface, knowledge and illusion, truth and lies, belief and fetishism, human and nonhuman, natural and synthetic. These other facets include dynamics of the technics of imagination, and their ambivalent articulation of relationships of control, training, care, violence, and love – a protopolitics evident in imaginative play. And, in postnatural media culture, the toy animal has migrated to digital habitats, offering an alternative animal perspective on questions of artificial intelligence. The child’s toy and media environment is playfully zoomorphic, populated with artificial animals, from toys and stories to virtual pets and videogame characters, a new simulacral and postnatural trajectory in the descendance of the artificial animal and its playful and play-like behaviours.
technology, play, the postnatural, protopolitics, toys, animals
1743-2197
60-74
Giddings, Seth
7d18e858-a849-4633-bae2-777a39937a33
Giddings, Seth
7d18e858-a849-4633-bae2-777a39937a33

Giddings, Seth (2024) Why look at toy animals? Play, protopolitics, and the postnatural. Cultural Politics, 20 (1), 60-74. (doi:10.1215/17432197-10969214).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This article addresses the toy as a neglected cultural and technical object. The toy is neither tool nor ritual object, and its animation in children’s imaginative play suggests alternative perspectives on the history and lived experience of material and technological artefacts. The concept of protopolitics is advanced to explore the implications for cultural politics of the ambiguous articulation of power relationships in play. The article takes the long history of the toy animal as a case study, drawing attention to its creaturely-artificial facets that go beyond, or more accurately precede, familiar cultural-political binaries of authentic and inauthentic, depth and surface, knowledge and illusion, truth and lies, belief and fetishism, human and nonhuman, natural and synthetic. These other facets include dynamics of the technics of imagination, and their ambivalent articulation of relationships of control, training, care, violence, and love – a protopolitics evident in imaginative play. And, in postnatural media culture, the toy animal has migrated to digital habitats, offering an alternative animal perspective on questions of artificial intelligence. The child’s toy and media environment is playfully zoomorphic, populated with artificial animals, from toys and stories to virtual pets and videogame characters, a new simulacral and postnatural trajectory in the descendance of the artificial animal and its playful and play-like behaviours.

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Toy Animals - Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 11 August 2023
Published date: 1 March 2024
Keywords: technology, play, the postnatural, protopolitics, toys, animals

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 481353
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/481353
ISSN: 1743-2197
PURE UUID: 5bebed7b-ba83-4eb5-bc9c-f159b6c4271d
ORCID for Seth Giddings: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-7323-9184

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 23 Aug 2023 17:04
Last modified: 10 Apr 2024 01:50

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