Human Play in Simmel’s Philosophy of Fashion Some Sociological Perspectives

By Peter M. Shea.

Published by The International Journal of the Arts in Society

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Article: Print	$US10.00
Article: Electronic	$US5.00

This paper is part of an ongoing project that seeks to contribute knowledge as to the whys of human play and in so doing contribute to an ontology of Concept Play. We examine and compare the writings of Georg Simmel’s short work on the Philosophy of Fashion to that of one of his contemporaries Johan Huizinga historian of human culture and author of Homo Ludens - a study of the play element of culture. The goal being to demonstrate that in the normative constructs of the human social structure fashion has a number of common characteristics with Concept Play and furthermore, Concept Play in counterplay with fashion imbues fashion and helps displays fashion at times playfully through the stages of historical and material modern social life, these circumstances lend support to a methectic theory of Concept Play.

Keywords:	Methectic, Consocial, Noumena

International Journal of the Arts in Society, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp.79-86. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 536.619KB).

Peter M. Shea

Postgraduate Student, Faculty of Media, Society and Culture, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

The writer has had a longstanding interest in this area of research. The last major project, ‘Leisure as a Basis of Culture - Selected Social formations Beechworth 1851-1877’ was a field based project that sought to confirm the inital theoretical underpinnigs put foward by Huizinga (1955) and to a lesser extent Callois (1961). The current project is in some regards and extension of that field research project. ‘Methectic Play - Conceptual Perspectives in Modern Play Theory is a work in porgress.

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