On the swing - Hunter Dukes in TLS:

‘What can seesaws, hammocks or tyres hanging from trees teach us about the human past and present? For Javier Moscoso, whose Arc of Feeling offers a global history of the swing, this question can be answered by performing an “archaeology of the visible”, an enquiry into “the transcendence of everyday objects, the circumstances that determine their use, their abuse and their neglect”. A historian of emotions and the senses, and the author of Pain: A cultural history (2012), Moscoso posits that these moving seats, now mainly confined to playgrounds and porches, served an important role in the development of religion, sexuality and “the physiology of orientation”. Dividing this last phrase into distinct sensations, he argues that swings help to explain the emergence of vertigo, disorientation, anguish, impulse and suspension as categories of experience. This is not a history of design – and students of that discipline may feel slighted by the dearth of makes and models. It is a story about human perception.’

(…)

‘Like all mechanisms of the erotic, swinging also involves violence, ecstasy and abjection in its appearances across history. In a matter of pages we read about European rope torture, the Hindu swinging ceremony of Charak Puja, where supplicant bodies are suspended on sharp hooks, the seventeenth-century erotic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei, in which a character mysteriously loses her virginity while dismounting a swing, and “a certain Dr Amelunxen”, who believed the best cure for vertigo is “the powdered stool of red squirrels, better female than male, up to the weight of a shield coin, to be taken every morning in wine or beer”.’

(…)

‘Swinging ultimately emerges here as representing a process that Herbert Marcuse once called repressive desublimation – creating “the illusion of freedom and emancipation” through “ritualized ways of favouring self-deception”.’

Read the review here.

Perhaps repressive desublimation is the cure to many political ills. And if we need a swing for that, by all means take the wing.

Let the electorate swing and we will have better politicians?

It’s worth trying. All citizens are entitled to a swing, provided for by the state.