More musings on play, politics and technology generated by my involvement in the iDC list discussion for the Digital Labor (sic) conference in NYC in November. The original post has been amended slightly so that it makes public sense - but please refer to the full discussion. (And note Brian Holmes' eloquent response to this post.)
Internet as Boho Art-Space and Heaving Public Square: play, Iran, Twitter, cybernetics
Yes, Julian and Brian, play is a primordially ambiguous domain of human responsiveness. Indeed, in terms of its evolutionary role as maintaining a sense of energized possibility for the organism, the darkest power-plays as well as the most bucolic festivities have to be part of its repertory of simulations, repetitions, games and laughter. (I often, and no doubt contentiously, say that if the work ethic can take a bad trip and end up at the sign over the gates of Auschwitz, the play ethic can also terminate in the boudoirs and rape/torture chambers of the good Marquis). Indeed, our multidisciplinary ludi-guru, Brian Sutton-Smith, would be the first to assert that the too-idealised zone of child's play is a pulsing phantasmagoria of transgression, insurrection, corporeal anarchy - if only adults could hear it. Part of my definition of a 'play ethic' is partly that the sheer non-moral openness of play compels us to think "ethically", in that Foucaultian sense of ethics as a practice of freedom. It's too powerful in our lives not to take, as it were, deadly seriously. So Julian, I do think I acknowledge play's murkier potentials - I'm not one of those legions of blithe boosters about its effects that appear in management circles, play as a toolbox for positive psychology. But you will know that that the final words of Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, when he lays out his evolutionary thesis about play, is a confession that "despite my extensive criticisms of the rhetoric of progress, I have now invented yet another form of it, although this time as only the potentiation of adaptive variability". I keep my eye on play theory for the same reasons, I think, that Deleuze and Guattari kept their eye on fractal mathematics, non-linear systems theory, or neuroscience. That is, as a resource to confirm my assumptions about an immanent creativity in the human condition (which of course for D&G was part of that greater, concept-strewn plane of materiality). It's certainly about counterposing a more open and unpredicable subject than the "Homer Economicus" of behavioural economics, that coming governmental logic in Euro-America, which erects upon our evolved psychosomatic equipment some miserably limited (and easily governable) consumer-citzens, "nudged" this way and that ahead of their savannah atavisms by a mandarinate of "liberal paternalists". Some of you may think it's dangerously positivist to engage in the "politics of human nature" this way: I feel the opposition is too powerful not to.
But to the "play-labor nexus". I urge you all to read Brian Holmes' very elegant essay on play, link previously posted here - http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/games-corporations-distant-constellations. And I want to take seriously Brian's, Ulises', Trebor's and others ludo-scepticism: That the absorption-in-possibility which defines the play experience is, through interaction design, a mechanism of identification with the social order - and one which could be, at worst, a willful mystification of our relationship with real-world exploitation ("Web 2.0 as ideology itself", as Brian says). In his new essay, Brian tries to establish some kind of opposition between play-as-identification, and play-as-disidentification. It's worth quoting at length, just for the prose:
.... Will a repressive hush fall back over the emergent world society, as the postmodern tool sets are gradually outfitted with surveillance mechanisms and encumbered with intellectual property laws, while dissident behaviors are pacified and normalized within corporate frames? Or will a resurgent artistic activism learn from its historical failures, and launch new and more effective techniques for the free and open transmission of countercultural knowledge? How to enlarge the circle of initiates? How to increase the possibilities of active participation? How – and where – to extend the terrains of struggle?
...The procedures of deskilling and deconditioning, the anti-disciplinary revolts deployed by the early vanguards against the remains of a bourgeois ideal of ennoblement, then by mid-twentieth century artists against the quality standards and technocratic abstraction of the corporate capitalist societies, are only understandable as a struggle within this dominant politics of culture, conceived in Schiller’s terms as the psychic vector of a social status quo: “free play” as the intimate and voluntarily cultivated instance of the state. This is what we are up against, if we seek, like the Situationists, to invent “an essentially new type of games.
... Now the urgency of deconditioning makes itself felt once again in vastly expanded cultural circles, even as the patronage of imperial capital exerts increasingly stronger channeling and framing effects. How to introduce a subversive “free play” into circuits of exchange that have been built up on the dogma of dematerialization, liquidity, liberalism? How to twist the grids of expression outside the control of the managerial elites? How to eliminate the brokers?
Behind this is his reading of Schiller's theory (which he shares with Terry Eagleton) casting the play-drive is the ultimate civic seduction, the ultimate embourgoisifier: "The revolutionary individual is not to be crushed, but should ultimately become the new regime". Yet I do think we get into hard politics here. And I do have some sympathy for John Sobol's blast against "the experts in theoretical revolution, who have insisted that capitalist networks are inherently anti-revolutionary, inherently anti-human, anti-inspiration" – particularly in the light of those furiously using Twitter, Friendfeed, Typepad and every other corporate platform they can get, to sousveille and maintain the momentum of the Iranian uprising.
In short, can one be a reformist in this discussion, as well as a revolutionary? And can play be developmental, as well as disruptive? Progressive as well as liminal? Bauwens' constant refrain on this list is that an autonomous digital counterculture can "fight/hack for user rights, open standards, free network service principles" with the commercial platforms: they can establish a 'social contract' (a social democracy?) from a strong base in which they build their own "radical distributed infrastructures". I go with Pekka Himanen that hackerism is the first real instantiation of a 'play ethic' in the network society. Isn't it this counterculture which presses externally and internally upon organisations like Twitter and Google? And hasn't hackerism deeply enabled - indeed, "conditioned" - the openness and iterability of the platforms currently being used by the Iranian people?
And yes, there is a degree of yada-yada-yada about our ritual invocation of the Italian autonomists here. But surely one of the things they get right is that our new sense of collective power (see Kevin Kelly's 'New Socialism' thesis in Wired) is more than just a by-product of an increasing cyberneticized fabric of society. Techno-potboilers like James Harkin's Cyburbia try to claim that cybernetics is the core, militarily-originated episteme that keeps us phatically and pointlessly chattering to each other, over brightly-coloured networks. But as Micheal Hardt puts it (http://www.vinculo-a.net/english_site/text_hardt.html), interactive machines aren't just "a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds", but also "a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves". This presumes a seer-through-the-lens - meaning, to some degree, a subject who can gain some Enlightenment-style purchase on their embroilment in protocol and code. An autonomous, passional, strategic player, not just the heteronomous, befuddled and processual played.
To bring it back to the moment of play: The point about the 'ambiguity of play', its necessary potentiation and proteanism, is that it encompasses (as Sutton-Smith says) both extreme agency and extreme envelopment. Play-as-fate-and-chaos, yes, the play of being caught up in cosmic mechanisms way beyond ones power to control or influence - but also play-as-progress, play-as-imagination, play-as-freedom. Cybernetics is indeed subtle and pervasive in its harnessing of human differentiation and singularity - but I'd content that play is more powerful, more generative and more constitutive of said difference and singularity. Because it is the 'difference engine' of our species, it always gives us enough cognitive and affective headroom - not just to generate better antagonisms to systems, but better systems as well.
Which is what Brian Holmes, to me, exactly does at the end of his playpiece, when he invokes the map-makings of personal and political potential conducted by Felix Guattari: that is, he points to a better system to support richer play. Radical creatives might want to disidentify from the interactive funfair of the entertainment-military complex, asks Brian - but where, other than the metropolis as a stage for "processual social events" and "punctual encounters", can they go to practice, let alone theorise, their counter-play? I am touched by Brian's answer:
The art circuit today – including not just museums, but the enlarged and diversified networks of experimentation, debate and display – can function as a public site of initiation to this kind of reading, making it a new form of common knowledge, too broad and unpredictable to remain under corporate control. In this way, art can help reactivate the suspended promise that sixties’ thinkers saw in the expansion of free time. If it can avoid capture and “ennoblement” (or conversely, brutal repression) by the pervasive powers of the corporate capitalist state.
The artworks before your eyes appear irreducibly singular, tangential, distant; and everything else that gives consistency and dynamism to dissenting subjectivities – the discourses, the technologies, the territories of intervention – is necessarily elsewhere, displaced into another space. Yet even within the seeming calm and neutrality of the museum, these constellations of distant universes are inviting you to play an essentially different kind of game.
This reminds me so much of that powerful essay that Habermas wrote about George Bataille in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (Google Books wont show me the relevant page - Bauwens' Chartists, advance!). But from misty memory, it's something about how Bataille's transgressive and illimitable practice – which is hard-core, radically-potentiating play - is good for the steering systems of modernity, in that it reminds governance that there will always be challenges to its complacency about meeting human needs and desires. Art institutions need artists, system needs lifeworld (even at the Bataillian limit), and networks need play (and players), to develop, form and reform.
We should be vigilant over forms of interaction labor that canalise the full spectrum of playful possibilities, yes. But it's a more exciting moment for systemic development, of all kinds, than a counsel of "control-society" despair. Precisely because we're players, and not laborers, in these playgrounds.
