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From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play · 4 of 13
From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
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Flow, Play, and the Subjunctive Mood

From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play Victor Turner
flow play subjunctive csikszentmihalyi

Problem This Solves

Writers depicting characters in states of total absorption -- ritual participants, athletes, artists, musicians, fighters -- often produce either flat descriptions of competence or mystical hand-waving. Turner's integration of Csikszentmihalyi's flow concept with his own framework of communitas and the subjunctive mood provides precise phenomenological criteria for what total involvement actually feels like from inside, and crucially distinguishes two experiences that are easily confused: individual flow (operating within rules and structure) and communitas (arising spontaneously between persons, often in spite of rules).

The deeper problem is the subjunctive mood of culture itself. Turner argues that liminality, play, and performance operate in the subjunctive ("as if," "what might be") against the indicative ("what is") of everyday social structure. Writers who cannot render the subjunctive produce fiction trapped in the indicative -- describing what is rather than enacting what might be.

Key Principle

Flow is "the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement" -- action follows action without conscious intervention, skills match demands, the ego dissolves, and the activity becomes autotelic (needing no external reward). But flow is experienced within an individual and requires rules to trigger it; it belongs to structure. Communitas, by contrast, arises "between or among individuals," often spontaneously and without rules -- "it can happen anywhere, often in despite of rules." Flow may be "one of the ways in which 'structure' may be transformed or 'liquefied' into communitas again." In pre-industrial societies, ritual was the main "flow-mechanism" for entire communities; after industrialization, flow was pushed into leisure genres (art, sport, games), becoming individualized and commodified. Play in pre-industrial ritual was "intercalibrated" with sacred work -- "the play is in earnest, and has to be within bounds" -- while post-industrial play operates in separated leisure time as a liminoid activity.

Good Examples

  1. Csikszentmihalyi's six elements of flow rendered precisely: merging of action and awareness ("self-consciousness makes him stumble"); centering of attention on a limited stimulus field ("only now matters"); loss of ego (the self as social broker becomes irrelevant); sense of control (skills matched to demands); coherent demands with clear feedback (you know whether you have done well); and autotelic nature ("to flow is to be as happy as a human can be"). A writer depicting a swordsman in combat, a musician in performance, or a ritualist in trance can use these six elements as a diagnostic checklist.

  2. Turner's distinction between flow and communitas in a group setting: a chess tournament where each player is privately absorbed in flow (sharing rules but experiencing separately) versus a ritual circle where participants experience genuine communitas -- "emergent shared experience arising from dialogue and mutual presence." The chess players are in structure; the ritual circle has dissolved structure. Communitas is "a matter of 'grace' rather than 'law.'"

  3. The Ndembu Twin Ritual (Wubwang'u) as play intercalibrated with sacred work: women and men abuse one another verbally in "a highly sexual and jocose way," but this ludic behavior serves the ritual aim of balancing fertility -- "cross-sexual joking both maintains reasonable fertility and restrains unreasonable fecundity." The play is functional, bounded, and serious despite its apparent frivolity.

Bad Examples

  1. Depicting flow as mystical transcendence with no internal logic. Flow requires specific structural conditions: limited stimulus field, clear rules, matched skill-to-demand ratio. A character who achieves total absorption in a chaotic, ruleless situation is not in flow -- they may be in communitas, panic, or dissociation, and the writer must know which.

  2. Collapsing communitas into flow. A group of revolutionaries who experience sudden, electric mutual recognition across social boundaries are in communitas, not flow. Communitas does not require rules, matched skills, or limited attention -- it is "prestructural" and arises from dialogue. Writing it as individual peak performance misses its essentially relational character.

  3. Treating play in ritual contexts as comic relief or leisure. In pre-industrial ritual, "ludic elements within ritual -- joking relationships, sacred games, riddles, mock-ordeals, holy fooling, clowning -- are intrinsically connected with the serious collective 'work' of the ritual." Writing ritual humor as mere entertainment strips it of its functional role. "The play is in earnest, and has to be within bounds."

Key Quotes

"Flow denotes the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement... a state in which action follows action according to an internal logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part." -- Csikszentmihalyi, quoted by Turner, Chapter 2

"'Flow' is experienced within an individual, whereas communitas at its inception is evidently between or among individuals -- it is what all of us believe we share and its outputs emerge from dialogue." -- Victor Turner, Chapter 2

"Subjunctivity is fittingly the mother of indicativity, since any actualization is only one among a myriad possibilities of being." -- Victor Turner, Chapter 4

"One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid." -- Victor Turner, Chapter 2

Rules of Thumb

  • Use Csikszentmihalyi's six elements as a checklist when writing characters in states of total absorption; the absence of any element should register as friction or disruption.
  • Distinguish sharply between individual flow (within structure, triggered by rules) and communitas (between persons, arising spontaneously, often despite rules).
  • Flow perceived from outside becomes non-flow: "Self-consciousness makes him stumble." Shift to external perspective to break flow; shift to internal to sustain it.
  • Play within ritual is functional and bounded -- "in earnest" -- not leisure or comic relief.
  • The subjunctive mood ("as if," "what might be") is the register of liminality, play, and performance; the indicative ("what is") is the register of everyday structure. Fiction that cannot shift into the subjunctive cannot render transformation.
  • People "will culturally manufacture situations which will release flow" -- characters denied flow in their assigned roles will seek it elsewhere, often transgressively.
  • After industrialization, flow migrated from communal ritual to individual leisure; modern characters experience flow in fragmented, commodified forms.

Related References