Here are the working notes to my recent presentation to the 'Tactical Play' conference at Birkbeck College, London - rough, but may be of interest.
Protean Activism: The Constitutive Politics of Play
Pat Kane, The Play Ethic
1. Much recent research in the mind-and-body sciences are beginning to
re-evaluate play as our principle of 'adaptive potentiation' - the life-long experimentalism and simulation needed to survive and flourish in the complex worlds of human society.
2. If play is now understood to found and ground an intrinsically 'transformative'
human nature, what consequences does this have for our politics, organizations, networks and even ethics?
3. If can relinquish what C.
Wright Mills called the 'labour metaphysic' in the face of our
constitutively protean natures, what kind of enterprises and projects can now begin to be conceived and pursued?
We can answer this by looking at two quite different socio-biological determinants of a 'ground of play'…
BRIAN SUTTON-SMITH
‘Play theory: a personal journey and new thoughts’ American Journal of Play, Summer 2008
I start from Sutton-Smith's 'adaptive potentiation' thesis in The Ambiguity of Play (1997). Play is "ambiguous" because it is a principle of variation in the organism, flexibility as our evolutionary resource. All those play forms, in all their diversity and fine-tuning of our responses to the world, help to keep us viable.
SS: Play, like sex, demonstrates that fun is an evolutionary salute. The outcome of the joy of sex can be birth, the outcome of the joy of play can be a 'lively viability':
Some quotes:
play as we know it is primarily a fortification against the disabilities of life. It transcends life’s distresses and boredoms and, in general, allows the individual or the group to substitute their own enjoyable, fun-filled, theatrics for other representations of reality in a tacit attempt to feel that life is worth living. That's In many cases as well, play lets us exercise physical or mental or social adaptations that translate— directly or indirectly—into ordinary life adjustments
In the recent 'Play Theory' paper, Sutton-Smith now wants to emphasise the emotional dimension of play:
We have already discussed how the primary cortex (the reflective operations) constrained the instinctive amygdala (the reflexive operations) to produce acceptable rule boundaries. But which side of the duality, instinct or guile, should prove most essential for successes within the games themselves, seems to me a toss up, whether we discuss sports, chance, strategy, profanity, festivals, or cynosural performers. More important was that we envisioned play as essentially a mutation, a synthesis of this duality of emotional expression and emotional regulation...
In short, to put it bluntly, pretend play begins a child’s training in the social duplicities. What fascinates me here is the dualism in human thought between, on the one hand, the triad of reflexive responses to danger, ancient uncontrollable emotions, and the workings of the amygdala, and on the other hand, a child’s own private pretending that counteracts the power of these subjective drives with equally wild sources of autonomous energy...
Yet remember that through play many of these counterpublic negatives are introduced into a civilization under the control of ludic regulations (rituals, rules, referees, and so on). Thus children who grow up with early access to this kind of play and who enjoy ludic support for the whimsy of their inner lives are likely to be more sophisticated in their mature social lives and more diplomatically adept in their everyday social relations...
Play doesn’t just consider possibilities in some rationalistic way, as many modern interpreters like to believe. Play is instead preoccupied with grievances and with distortions and with social status more than it is with mathematical probabilities. There are not merely Finite and Infinite Games...
Play begins as a mutation of real conflicts and functions thusly forever afterwards. Play was always intended to serve a healing function whether for child or adult, making it more worthwhile to defy the depressing and dangerous aspects of life. Play is neurologically a reactive itch of the amygdala, one that responds to archetypal shock, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. But play also includes a frontal-lobe counter, reaching for triumphant control and happiness and pride.
If play is a 'training in the social duplicities', then it is always tactical play…
ITALIAN AUTONOMISTS AND PLAY
Antonio Negri and Paulo Virno - two representative thinkers.
Both believe that the ideal society is structured like a language – a great robust and common potentiality that allows for an infinitude of singular productions.
They look to the fact that the entirety of our selves – emotions and ideas, as well as physical labours – are commanded to be put into service by markets and capitalism.
But this is what they call the 'communism of capital': businesses make money out of our complex interactions and communicative actions together. Capitalism is "parasitic" on our common productivity.
If for Sutton-Smith, play is "adaptive potentiation", play here is "disruptive potentiation" – the event or the strategy (Carnivals against Capitalism, or Climate Camp at the G20) that disrupts orthodox political consensus through creative action.
PAULO VIRNO is a fascinating thinker in this field…
(Autonomedia, 2008) [Mute review]
"There is no objective investigation of human nature that does not carry with it, like a clandestine traveller, at least the trace of a theory of political institutions" (Multitude)
- Virno sees us in a "bio-anthropological" way – we are linguistic animals primarily
- Virno notes a lot of recent research around "mirror neurons". This claims that the basis of human empathy and compassion (the "Gandhi neurons", in words of V.S. Ramchandran) are revealed by brain scans. These show that when we watch activity in others, the neurons which signify the same activity in our brains light up involuntarily.
- But Virno says that our language clearly gives us the ability to deny those neurons, to "negate" that pre-existing capacity for empathy. He cites the Nazi commandant denying the humanity of the concentration camp victim (twisting around Primo Levi's statement, "this is not a man")
- Yet we cannot return to a pre-linguistic state - we are throughly linguisticized animals, we are open to all the possibilities that our abstracting minds can concieve…
- Our political stance has to be a willingness to be creative, as well as destructive, in our linguistic ability to deny our compassionate or mutualist neuropsychology. We have to use the "openness" of our existence as linguistic creatures to imagine better, more just words, as well as crueller ones.
- We can look at humour – the play of, in and with words - as an indication that we can think our way into any 'state of exception':
[A]ll jokes, as well as endeavors to modify one’s form of life in a critical situation, are nourished either by the unusual combination of given elements or by an abrupt deviation toward ulterior elements….
[T]he logico-linguistic resources required to open up an unforeseen way out of Pharaoh’s Egypt are the same resources which nurture jokes (and para-logistic inferences) characterized by displacement, that is to say by an abrupt deviation in the axis of discourse.
At the linguistic level, displacement means changing the topic while a conversation is already proceeding along well-defined tracks. In the political field, displacement is actualized as leave-taking, as defection, as exodus. Virno emphasizes that he sees exodus as a collective action, which hinges on the para-logistic principle of tertium datur: a third way beyond any dialectical movement, an asymmetrical third possibility. Exodus is a nondialectical form of negation and resistance, or rather, of defecting and fleeing. Confronted with the question of whether they would submit to the pharaoh or openly rebel against his rule, the Israelites invent another possibility that could not have been conceived before: They flee.
SO HERE ARE TWO PROTEAN POLITICAL POSITIONS…
Brian Sutton-Smith: play (as adaptive potentiation and emotional management) is like religion – helps the human animal to rise above the endemic stresses of life, with enthusiasm and invention. Gives us tactics of feinting and imagining as a means of coping. But it veers close to play as a 're-creation', a healing compensation for the insuperable stresses of life.
Paulo Virno: play (in the form of witty humour, innovative public action) demonstrates language's power to deny our mirror neurons. So play is like revolution. It demonstrates our potential to use our common resources of expression and communication to defy orthodoxy and top-down power, and envision a new society.
Adaptive potentiation vs disruptive potentiation… quite a 'strategic' choice, for 'tactical' players....
ends
