subordinating to something Does "subordinating to play" mean "subordinating the seriousness of culturalism to play"? Context: In Right to the City, which, as the title suggests, polemically asserts the urban dweller’s claim to participatory citizenship, he writes that such a ‘renewed fete’ was ‘fundamentally linked to play’ and involved, in an echo perhaps of Hall’s ‘modernism in the streets’, ‘subordinating to play rather than to subordinate play to the seriousness of culturalism'.