Making playful self: Fabricating “the abnormal” in joyfulness

• In Event: Politics of Affect: The Technologies of Governance in Making Normative Subjectivities in Education

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how playfulness—first conceptualized by Lieberman in postwar psychological research—emerged as a measurable personality trait in relation to creativity and cognitive development that transformed joy from a spontaneous emotion into a normative developmental index. It explores how joy as a technology of affective governance was translated and operationalized in playfulness to (re)produce difference and exclusion through measurement and norms in education.

Theoretical Framework and Methodology
The study employs historical and conceptual genealogy (Foucault, 1980; Danziger, 1992) as a method to trace how the construct of playfulness emerged through particular scientific assemblages, experimental rationalities, and socio-political conditions. It explores how joy, framed as a constitutive element of playfulness, was translated and operationalized as a calculable indicator in psychological research—linked to cognitive potentiality for measuring, predicting, classifying, and producing the ideal creative child—and circulated as a moral-affective norm through educational and developmental practices.

Drawing on Nikolas Rose’s concept of “inventing the self” (Rose, 1998), this paper unpacks the post–World War II proposition of playfulness as a technique for inventing an ideal and aspirational self—creative, playful, and joyful—through psychological technologies embedded in specific scientific rationalities, particularly those shaped by experiential reasoning, systems theory, and cybernetics, which made possible the integration of affect into cognition for inventing an programmable, predictable, and operationable mind and self.

However, these ideals–creative, playful, and joyful–at that moment were not neutral but were embedded in the postwar political and historical imageries and it carries to the present as the politics of distributing difference and exclusions. These ideals were emphasized to promote open-minded, emotionally expressive, and prosocial citizens in contrast to the rigid, authoritarian personalities associated with the totalitarian threats of World War II (Cohen-Cole, 2009; Martins, 2025). Yet joy, in particular, carried deeper ethical and religious sensibilities inherited from Christian traditions in which it symbolized divine presence, moral virtue, and relational harmony. These religiously infused ideals of joy were secularized and psychologized in postwar developmental discourse, becoming normative affective expectations that aligned moral goodness with emotional expressivity and social adaptability. This alignment operated as a “double gesture” (Popkewitz, 2008) in the present, in which the inclusion of certain affective traits as developmental ideals simultaneously produced the exclusion of those deemed emotionally deficient, uncreative, or socially deviant.

Findings
Playfulness was not a descriptive trait, but a technology of subject formation shaped by postwar aspirations for democratic, emotionally expressive citizens. Joy became a calculable and governable affect, reconfiguring the child through predictive models and variable-based interventions. Psychological measurement redefined abnormality and disability through statistical deviation, producing new forms of exclusion and affective abjection.

Significance of Study
This paper is not to negate the roles of play and joy in education, but rather to unpack the underlying historical conditions, epistemological assumptions, and political implications that have shaped their normalization. By critically examining how joy has been operationalized as a developmental ideal and regulatory affect in playfulness, the study invites reflection on how affective expectations in education may produce forms of exclusion in the name of inclusion and well-being.

Author

• Chushan Wu, University of Wisconsin - Madison