Again, enjoying the struggle to write to this space, given the way that world history is inviting me to begin where my last book ended (see this post). I picked up a pungent Lagavulin of a book today in the LRB bookshop, called Afflicted Powers, written by a bunch of Bay Area situationists called Retort.
As ever, man in a hurry, I'm working my way back from the conclusion... which has this classic passage, where the authors imagine the justification given by an Al-Qaida vanguardist militant for their activities:
I have chosen not to be modern; and only I have a proper estimate or what it takes, minute by minute, to make that choice real. I have built a life-world which is truly the negation - the strict, obsessive, point-by-point inversion - of the modern life I once had.
I embrace the finite and bonded as opposed to the formless. I choose self-sacrifice as opposed to self-satisfaction, and hardness and cruelty as opposed to complaisance. I close myself against all but the narrowest range of messages, and those messages I repeat to myself endlessly, and deeply internalize - in flight from the lightness, the thinness and exteriority, of "belief" in modern conditions. Denial will be my God, not appetite. The planned and ritualised will put paid to contingency.
Last Man happiness will mean nothing to me ['last man' from Nietzche - see this reference]. Suicide (that most modern of negations) will be my telos, and I reserve my deepest scorn for the enemy's instituted non-recognition of death. I pursue the unmediated - the act, the killing, the pure flame of destruction - as antidote to what you moderns are living, and do not know how desperately you wish to escape from: the endless reel of representation. "Violence shall synchronize my movements like a tune,/And Terror like a frost shall halt the flood of thinking" [quote from Auden's "In Time Of War"].
Haven't read the whole book yet, but their classic situ-thesis seems to be that "the Left" need their own critique of 'the modern' - meaning our surface, choice-laden, whim-driven self-creating consumerist lifestyles - which is "non-nostalgic, non-anathematizing, non-regressive, non-fundamental, non-apocalyptic". Usual suspects are yearned after (the 'movement of movements', World Social Forum, Chiapas, etc) as possible bearers of such a critique.
What strikes me - and this may be useful, or useless - is that many of Sutton-Smith's rhetorics of play, both modern and ancient, cover both sides of the dichotomy expressed by Retort's imagined militant. In the spectrum of play forms, play-as-progress, play-as-freedom, play-as-imagination - the 'lightness, thinness, exteriority' of modern traditions of play, its 'self-satisfaction', its 'contingency' - co-exist with play-as-power (jihad or itijihad, struggle), play-as-identity (collective carnival and ritual), and play-as-fate-and-chaos (in which death is explicitly 'recognised' as a possible outcome of our plays).
The sheer diversity, and often contradictoriness, of play's values often confounds those studying it (and Sutton-Smith's anchoring of it all as an evolutionary strategy for humans, our 'adaptive potentiation', always threatens to stop rather than start discussion). But perhaps it points to the underlying value of a playful perspective - which might be as the most appropriate sensibility for appreciating true human diversity.
A playful world is one in which we might want the option to be either egoistically free, or ritually bonded, or both, or neither. Yet all options will be explored by consciousnesses that know they exist in a mediated, globalised world - meaning no return to some purer, pre-modern past - but are also strong enough to regulate their levels of connectedness to that world. What kind of post- or alter-modern mindset might this be? What Robert Kegan calls 'constructive post-modernism'?
And yes, the spiritual ground of play - explored wonderfully by a new friend of the Play Ethic project, Gwen Gordon - will be a necessary baseline for such a world. Those on 'the Left' (a tribe I fitfully belong to) are often woefully inarticulate about such matters, and even less willing to allow others to anchor their activities in some conception of the sacred or cosmic. But my last full chapter in the Play Ethic gave voice to spiritually-grounded cultural critics like Douglas Rushkoff and Ziauddin Sardar, who demonstrate the kind of literacy required.
I know my ambitions for play as an explanatory framework are often lofty. But even in these panicky times, it still seems like a mindset that could allow the spiritual and the secular, the terrorist and the situationist, the devout and the profane, to at least begin conversations about how to build a world adequate to the complexity of human consciousness, motivations and values.
