the author(s) 2011 ISSN 1473-2866 www.ephemeraweb.org volume 11(4): 406-432 406 ephemera theory & politics in organization articles Who is Yum-Yum? A cartoon state in the maki Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen The departure of this article is a Danish public campaign called ‘Healthy through play’. The campaign is organized around a cartoon figure named Yum-Yum. Yum-Yum is the campaign’s description of itself, but it also becomes a semantic of the State. With Yum-Yum, the state is turned into a cartoon character with long plushy ears, widely spaced eyes, and a very large and soft nose. Maybe we are witness to the making of a carton State, a playful State? Yum-Yum is cute, friendly, playful, inviting, and above all completely harmless. The cartoon state seems to be a state that gets in the way of itself. It is a state whose impotence consists precisely in the fact that it is state. The state would rather be (civil) society. In order to work as state and have power over the self-relation of it citizens, it has to look different than a state. The state plays that it is (not) a state and hopes that someone will play along so that it may yet work as state. Introduction The present article presents an analysis of the campaign ‘Healthy through play’, organized by the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Fisheries. ‘Healthy through play’ is aimed particularly at vulnerable families and their willingness, knowledge, and capacity to live a healthy lifestyle with respect to both food and exercise. In general terms, the campaign exists as one among a larger number of campaigns that have been launched over the course of the past decade, directed at citizens and their administration of their own lives. This applies not only to the health sector but also the labor market, transportation, education, and so on. The starting point for this article is the fact that this is a campaign ultimately concerned with the self-creation of citizens. Central to the article, in turn, is the way in which the campaign links its content to play. Why is the concept of play so central to the campaign? What do play and campaign share in common? What do health and play share in common? Play is understood in this article as a particular form of communication, which makes social contingency visible by doubling the world into a virtual play world, and a real one that can be played with (Andersen, 2009; Baecker, 1999). Basically, this is a state-run campaign that simultaneously seeks to and seeks not to be a campaign, seeks to and seeks not to be regulation (Pors, 2009). This results in a form of embarrassment, and the way to escape this embarrassment is through play. I argue, abstract