Radical Fun

What is fun? How do we describe it? It is something enjoyable; it feels good. It's...well, it's fun.  It is challenging to explain fun.

There is no doubt that such an experience exists or occurs within the human body. However, it is not an object that can easily be discerned and agreed upon by a consensus of audience members. Sure, there are signs that a person may be experiencing fun: they might be smiling, maybe their heart rate increases a bit, perhaps they appear intensely focused. But all of these signs could just as well be the result of an entirely different sort of experience.

Until science and technology present us with a reliable tool for objectively measuring the occurrence and magnitude of fun, we have only the subject's phenomenological reports to rely upon as the most available means of mapping fun. Such reporting - we're all aware - comes rife with bias. Without sustained and rigorous research, it likely accounts for the ambivalence (at best) with which scholars have approached the phenomenon of fun. Undeniably, the human species possesses the capability to experience a phenomenon that we characterize as "fun." One would be hard-pressed to find a person who would be just fine living a life void of the experience.  

Nevertheless, the academic archive holds scant evidence that scholars have considered fun a topic worthy of serious consideration throughout history. That is not to say that evidence of fun scholarship does not show up repeatedly in academic discourse for just about as long as we can account for such discourses. Evidence of fun scholarship is prolific in adjacency. From Plato's disdain for poetry and fiction to Marxist concepts on leisure ideology to the efficacy-entertainment dyad of the early performance studies moment. 

Recent technological, social, and economic convergences have opened an opportunity for fun scholarship to crawl out from beneath discursive obfuscation and stake a claim as an articulated ontology worthy of "serious" academic contemplation.

Nevertheless, the academic archives hold scant evidence that scholars throughout history have considered fun a topic worthy of serious consideration.  That is not to say that evidence of fun scholarship does not show up over and over in academic discourse for just about as long as we can account for such discourses.  Evidence of fun scholarship is prolific in adjacency.  From Plato’s disdain for poetry and fiction, to Marxist concepts on the ideology of leisure, to the efficacy-entertainment dyad of the early performance studies moment. 

Recent technological, social, and economic convergences have opened an opportunity for fun scholarship to crawl out from beneath discursive obfuscation and stake a claim as an articulated ontology worthy of “serious” academic contemplation.