Children’s purposeless play resists exchange-value by rehearsing a redeemed praxis.

Evidence

In his purposeless activity the child, by a subterfuge, sides with use-value against exchange value. Just because he deprives the things with which he plays of their mediated usefulness, he seeks to rescue in them what is benign towards men and not what subserves the exchange relation that equally deforms men and things. The little trucks travel nowhere and the tiny barrels on them are empty; yet they remain true to their destiny by not performing, not participating in the process of abstraction that levels down that destiny, but instead abide as allegories of what they are specifically for. Scattered, it is true, but not ensnared, they wait to see whether society will finally remove the social stigma on them; whether the vital process between men and things, praxis, will cease to be practical. The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 253

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: ‘The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real’ — play as utopian allegory, negative dialectic crystallized in toys that ‘abide as allegories of what they are specifically for.’ This is top-tier Adorno.
• XREF: Inverts Marx’s species-being and the labor theory of value: for Adorno freedom is not work but play that abstains from production; connects to Benjamin’s theory of allegory in the Trauerspiel book.