The Play Ethic

Poverty Porn, part two: comfortable homes, 'acting-up', quality or form

Been snowed with comments on all media about my column for the Sunday Herald on BBC's The Scheme as poverty porn, and my subsequent tv debate with Stuart Cosgrove.

I think the best sustained discussion forum has been 38 Minutes, Channel Four's new media community site in Scotland, where Stuart and I have had some detailed exchanges. See for yourself what the discussion has been like - strong and varied - but I thought I'd edit and present Stuart and I's exchanges here. I'll update if we barney some more (Joan McAlpine has also joined the conversation).

This is an important debate about the role of public media in Scottish life, among good people, worth arguing to a standstill, I think. And as I always say, all play needs its ethic - tv documentary no less. All comments welcome.

PAT:

The defining sequence in the second episode of The Scheme [first episode here] is where junkie Marvin's girlfriend Dayna is standing on the green beside a cameraman. The shot dips towards the grass for a moment, showing the cameraman's silhouette for a moment, then rises up just in time to catch one of the neighbours socking Dayna shockingly in the face. Now does anyone *really* believe that the camera was simply "documenting" this kind of violence - or were they actually eliciting this kind of behaviour by their presence, like some overly-resourced happy-slapping phonecam video? 

This is the gold, the money-shots, that these documentary makers were panning for - the dog shit in the hallway, the wee daughter fingering the condoms on the shelves - as much shock-horror about the failure of the moral character of the poor as they could string into one episode. If you talk to social workers who deal with cases like Marvin and Dayna's, their aim is to get them to "re-story" their lives - to construct a narrative about how they'll progressively head towards a better life, small step by small step. 

By turning the chaos of their lives into such a public strip cartoon - Sorcerer's Apprentice sound track and all - the documentary makers rob the poor of the right to control the story of their own lives, which is a fragile, tentative and patience-intensive process best conducted privately and supportively. There's a regrettable faux-lumpen mentality in some stretches of the Scottish creative classes - eg below, "marvin cannae watch the Scheme cos some cunt's nicked his Plasma" - which is actually a way of denying the extreme structural inequality in Scottish life: don't sweat it mucker, we're all heiders together. 

No we're not: some of us have the power and responsibility to help the post-post-industrial classes to articulate their visions and regain their autonomy. And some of us are ok with them being antic entertainment, ratings-winning displays of character collapse. Sorry, folks, can't post-modernise this one away.

STUART:

Yes they were selecting and highlighting for effect like every other form of media and communication from literature to film - really surprised you are so startled and appalled by this Pat

Observational documentary is among one of the most selective and narratively chosen forms of media why would it not do those things?

You can say its clunky in style but to be shocked that it happens is bizarre. Surely you don't believe that this form of television is any more or less about form and convention than other forms of television, like history-reality shows or light entertainment. You can't 'naive' that one away

• The Scheme - Clunky Observational Documentary that uses underclass Scotland as its raw material.
• Sweet Sixteen - Bitter-sweet Ken Loach feature which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.
• Rab C. Nesbitt - Hyper-panto comedy series which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.
• Greyhounds for Breakfast - Great hyper-real literature using underclass Scotland as raw material.
• David Gillander's utterly brilliant photojournalism which won the Getty Prize and uses underclass Scotland as its raw material.
• Channel 4's Knife Crime Commission - discursive current affairs that uses underclass Scotland as its raw material
• Billy Connolly's The Crucifixion - Comedic parody of the Bible which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.

All of the above cultural producers enjoy successful careers and to my knowledge live in very comfortable homes.

So for me the real issue is not whether form should sue unedrclass Scotland as Scotland - that is a time-honoured creative tradition. What is at stake is one of two things - quality or formal construct? Either the form of observational documentary or the quality of the series?

If you hate it as telly that’s fine – I’m not sure I really care to defend that - but get it into some perspective please. To object to film-makers creating a cultural product from this raw subject matter is bizarre, self-defeating and against the grain of history.

PAT:

Stuart, not remotely denying any documentary maker the right to edit, narrate, shape reality, any of that - silly point. But do you remember a show from the early Channel Four, called Open The Box? They did an item where they filmed a camera crew filming a working class couple, decent but not too articulate, and showed how they were herded around, patronised - the director David Cohen even said at one point, 'never work with children or animals'. 

Your channel at its most subversive - showing the objectifying, class-ridden character of so much media production - time for some of that media critique back I think. Here's a commission for you, suggested by a one time resident of Onthank (now a think-tank director): why don't you give the residents of Onthank a few HD cameras, an editing suite, some expertise, and get them to follow tv production folk around for six months?

And yes, you're right, the BBC did have a tradition of community video programming which they let completely fall away. Why don't we revive that in our brand new Scotland? Or can we really imagine the broadcasting Lubiankas on the Clyde really opening their doors to the contextualisng community? We probably need a Media Panther fan-out into the community, Chavez and Gilberto Gil style (and you're writing about Detroit 1967 at the moment, surely you validate that kind of activity?). We need at least two dedicated scottish digital channels to give us some space for different voices, other editorial policies on the reality of Scottish life, to be heard - and more importantly, practise their street-media craft.

But please don't try to deny the loop between a 'punchy', 'character-driven' bit of drama-doc on the broken poor, and the general shift towards 'behavour management' and 'workfare' that's been the legacy of Thatcher-Blair-Cleggaron. This edit sets up the undeserving poor in a way the Victorians would happily recognise, and no doubt Ian Duncan Smith will glory in. (Possibly deliberate? Commissioned at a time when it looked like a Tory victory was inevitable? Just saying...).

I even hate the term underclass we've all fallen into using - a semi-eugenic term from the American neo-conservative right. I think the gaze of this programme, the "casting choices" they've made makes me more disgusted with them everytime I dwell on it. I mean, poor poor Marvin is so emaciated he almost looks like a different species. I'll admit that what does come through their sub-anthropological gaze is a real crisis of masculinity - apart from the patriarch of the Crees, all the men in the first two episodes bear all the pain and distortion of two generations of worklessness, while the girls and women are all mostly ebullient glamazons. 

I've no problem about cameras trying to capture the physical reality of poverty - and as many have said here (and to me privately), the sheer witness of the camera in The Scheme might do some good in reviving our collective shame and responsibility about poverty in Scotland. But that'll be in spite of its leering, prissy aesthetic, not because ot it. Where are the Frederick Wiseman emulators in the Scottish documentary commuity?

STUART:

Tom says: “Oh, and can we stop referring to them as 'characters'. They're real. Aren't they?"

Pat says:”...not remotely denying any documentary maker the right to edit, narrate, shape reality, any of that - silly point."

Far from being silly I think that is the deep core of the debate and the real reason that 'reality Tv or 'reality ob-doc' divide opinion so virulently. We seem more relaxed about forms where the lines between the 'real person' and the 'character' are more clearly drawn. Frank in Shameless is clearly an actor playing a character, the residents of the Big Brother house are real people who have agreed to partcipate in an entertainment game in which they assume the role of 'characters', programmes like X Factor are talent shows in which 'characters' like SuBo surface from the real world to seek fame. The trouble with the scheme is that people are less willing to accept the finer and less obvious lines between real people assuming 'character' status in something so close to 'documentary.'

What is so special about the documentary form that it alone cannot be transgressed - they were real people, with 'characteristics' and in some cases were promoting their 'character' or as some people have sauid 'acting up for the camera'.

In an era where cameras surround us daily why are some people allowed to 'act-up' and others not?

PAT:

We all "assume character status" in the service economy - we're all asked to construct an attractive, performative self in order to fit in to various service behaviour scripts (whether svengali Simon Cowell's or the training dept of Marks And Spencer's). I'm sure that why all forms of reality tv, either entertainment or community-based, resonate with Britons - it frames, and sometimes unravels, the the process of 'front' (or bullshit if you're feeling negative) that a large chunk of the working population is involved in daily. Not so much 'acting up' as 'acting out' the role that HR departments lay down for them.

I do think there's a deep attraction among the service workforce in watching the couch-dwelling, quilt-hugging wastrels of The Scheme (which is why it's hurtling around their favourite medium, Facebook at the moment). The Schemies are on a permanent sickie, rather than the temporary one that so many take as a respite from the grinding of their soul (and which causes employers such continuing consternation). They are the spectre that Brown used to aim his workfare at - "lying about all day, watching tv, doing nothing" - and that IDS is cranking up the benefit police on.

I guess, Stuart, you think that if all the world these days is a Truman-Show-like mediated stage, then why shouldn't the work-shy poor of the Ten's have their unashamed moment performing themselves in the spotlight, in the same way as two upper-working-class 80s boys from Coatbridge thought they could make music like Quincy Jones?

But it's not the same, is it? If you're an artist - and I'd have to say, if you were the writer and director of Shameless or Rab C. Nesbitt, undoubtedly writing from their own experiences - your performance is an expression of mastery or skill or vision, or at least an aspiration towards that. You also at some deep level want your 'performance' to tie together some aspects of the human condition, touch some deeper truths. Do you really think Marvin and Dayna are being 'artists of their lives', that they are enjoying their rights to 'act-up' their incoherence and incompetence at daily living, in the same way?

A working-class artist writes their script, or their song, and feels empowered, enlarged - they've conducted an act of poiesis, they've made their mark on the world. What psychological impact do we think this media spectacle of their ruin, however 'acted-out or up' it is, will have on the more heartbreaking participants in The Scheme - and do the documentary makers even care? Or as some of us keep saying, are they basically just raw fodder for a media which is exploiting the status and performance anxieties of a too-competitive, too-marketised nation, by showing them either redemptive or cautionary narratives of self-construction?

That's why I keep coming back to a rethinking of community tv - and why 38 Minutes is a good place to have this discussion. Do we always need be trapped within the editing suites of Tellyworld when we think of a media that empowers those who need to be empowered? With social media, it's not about the right to edit or perform, but the democratisation of the means and skills of editing and performance.

I know this all sounds 'back to the future'/early 80's - but perhaps our world of ubiquitous, cheap and powerful media was exactly the infrastructure those community video makers were dreaming of. Enable that, Channel Four, and you eventually might get the documentary equivalent of a Kelman, coming out of nowhere predictable, rather than these well-fashioned penny-dreadfuls like The Scheme. Let people ACTUP, in the manner of the 80's aids-activist moment, rather than just 'act-up'.

JOAN MCALPINE:

It's not the middle classes who congregate around The Scheme and set up facebook groups about Marvin's plasma telly. It's other working class people - most Scots are just a generation away from a council house and still have family on schemes. The voice of the breezeblocks has no problem getting itself heard thanks to social networking. The faceboook fans of the show exchange anecdotes about the drug addicts and neds making their granny's life a misery in Drumchapel/Kilmarnock/Greenock or wherever. They recognise the Onthank "characters". But the views they express about benefit dependence, poor parenting and methadone prescription, are far more judgemental than anything the programme makers would dream of saying. They make a Daily Mail leader seem overly liberal. (If I may be allowed my own Daily Mail moment, why the hell was poor Dayna on a methadone programme at the age of 18? Was there really no alternative? It was the social workers, not the programme makers, who did that.) Unlike Pat I think the programme was fair and showed the complex side of many characters - particularly that of Gordon Cunningham, trying to raise his family and make amends for his own past mistakes. The only ethical issue I have is with the young child Kendal who was unable to give informed consent and who doesn't really need this difficulty added to the other burdens in her life ie her hopeless mother.

One aspect of The Scheme's popularity that has been overlooked in these discussions is it's uncompromising Scottishness. We hardly every see slices of contemporary Scottish life on telly, or hear people speaking this language - the skeletal, linguistic remains of Burns' Kilmarnock Edition. When we do, we find it hilarious. That's why the character's "catchphrases" are now being printed on t-shirts. Mark is right to compare it to the John Smeaton moment. But what does our excitement and hilarity on hearing Scots enter the mainstream say about our attitute to the language we still speak on occasion, and which our parents and grandparents used unselfconciously? We love to hear it, but we simultaneously cringe. It's fit only for comedy shows. We mock these characters because, unlike us, they are unable (or unwilling) to adjust their speech patterns for the occasion.

fOR MORE SEE http://times.cluster.newsint.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7140118.ece

STUART:

Pat says about the nature of people 'performing' But it's not the same, is it? If you're an artist - and I'd have to say, if you were the writer and director of Shameless or Rab C. Nesbitt, undoubtedly writing from their own experiences - your performance is an expression of mastery or skill or vision, or at least an aspiration towards that. You also at some deep level want your 'performance' to tie together some aspects of the human condition, touch some deeper truths. Do you really think Marvin and Dayna are being 'artists of their lives', that they are enjoying their rights to 'act-up' their incoherence and incompetence at daily living, in the same way?

I entirely agree with this there is a difference and there is a qualitiative gulf between the two things. But I am reluctant to say that Paul Abbot's right to recreate his families failings as the semi-autobiographical author of Shameless - a series I care a lot about, therefore prevents others from authoring their lives even if it is with less creativity. If that were the case a lot of created culture would fall away. Is 'showing off' in The Scheme so markedly different from say being drunk at a local karaoke, or being so incoherent you actually can't perform which is what I've seen from both Gil Scott Heron and The Pogues over the years. I'm nervous about a hierarchy that says some have permission to 'perform' via the mass media and others don't and that the permission will be granted by those that already enjoy the privilege of success in life. 

PAT:

Stuart, yes, I guess I'm making an artist's critique of the kind of "presenting" and performance that's going on in The Scheme. Kimberley's dance competition was utterly fantastic - like an irruption of Rio and Berlin into the middle of Ayrshire. (Away with yir El Sistema - I could have done with a whole documentary about that event). But apart from that, are there no local bands there, no hackers into technology, no menshie wall-sprayers? What courses, therapies, classes were happening at the community centre that WAS built? No joiners/decorators/sparks who were applying their compulsive ingenuity to local projects, house extensions? Looking at poor communities through the lens of what craft and skills they have gives a different result than picking off the worst or near-worst families and turning them into self-subverting strip cartoons. We know the old names to guide us by - Paulo Friere, Augusto Boal, recently Richard Sennett - and there are a few new ones too (Simon Yuill's history of bringing notational skills into tough communities comes to mind).

My youngest bro told me of a call he heard on Real Radio - a guy claiming to have been covered by The Scheme's makers for six months, in which he built up a help website to aid diabetes sufferers, and got married to his childhood sweetheart. He'd been told he hadn't make the cut - "maybe my story was too boring", he'd said. I know from my correspondence that there are many more, subtler stories to be told about Onthank than we're getting here - to grant this edit the generic title of 'The Scheme' is a complete misnomer about life in these communities. I hope one of the consequences of the stushie around this show is that we could perhaps get a web-enabled 'Stories from The Scheme' - stories not used, longer testimonies from people, interesting sideline material, follow-ups on the fate of individuals. And perhaps BBC could revise its editing policy, and invite those filmed into the heart of the production process - an education for both sides, very possibly.

Joan, you're right about the Scots-language element not being remarked upon - thought as a veteran of the Poll Tax wars, you'd probably want a Scots that had a lot more militancy and political consciousness than here. But on methodone and housing - we just don't know what stage of care any of these characters are at, how well others are doing round about them: it's a snapshot of the worst families entirely shorn of any of the systems that are undoubtedly trying to handle them, part of my beef about the prurient selectiveness of the series - showing the pathology, not the sociology. Something less pornographic (yes, still using the term) and fetishizing of the poor wouldn't get the Facebook groups frothing.

Thoughts on "Avatar": change it all, so nothing changes

A few points and theses inspired by James Cameron's Avatar:

1) Why is hi-tech/virtual Hollywood so anti-imperialist and anti-corporate? Maybe it's the movies I'm choosing to see. But as an example, take the last three Pixar movies. The Incredibles has that sequence where Mr. Incredible is trying to hold down a job in an insurance company, defying bureaucracy and the profit motive to give fragile old ladies their health cover. Wall-E describes a brand-totalitarianism - the Buy'n'Large corporation - that has despoiled Earth, turned humans into dependent grubs, and conducted a program of mass delusion and seduction to keep the truth from citizens. (Only knowledge, love and virtuous robotics can break through the mental grip). 

And UP!, though it's mostly about the joys of ageing, has its expected anti-corporate sequence at the beginning, where impassive suits in shades exploit the tiniest social and legal infraction to get old Carl out of his house, so the developers can move in. The Pixar paradox/hypocrisy - these vast, thoroughly commercialised and marketed 'event' movies preaching about the balance of nature, the primacy of relationships, the tawdriness of capitalist modernity - has often been noted.

And you'd have to say that, at first sight, Avatar is the height of this tendency. The colonisers of Pandora represent mid-22nd century American(ised) culture at its most brutal and reductive - its empty consumerism ("they don't want what we have"), its bottom-line commercial myopia, its terrifying patriarchal/hierarchical militarism (literally embodied in the military commander Miles Quaritch), all supported by a gross technological power. The humanoid species they face, and whose mineral deposits they want to secure, live in a state of hunter-gatherer equilibrium, supported by a mythology and set of practices familiar from accounts of aboriginal cultures. The Na'avis connection with nature, however, is more than merely systemic or ecological, but bio-neural - they can entwine their ganglia with the neurology of other fauna and flora in Pandora, and transmit and receive messages with them.

I want to say more about this piece of post-human wish fulfillment later. But I think it gives a clue to why the most technologically cutting-edge movies have a consistently anti-authoritarian tone. In essence, the geeks and techs have inherited the shooting lot in Hollywood. And geek/techdom often operates best in small, motivated, obsessive groups, who often simply want to be mostly left alone to solve their problems and come up with new ones. They obviously have to deal with the managers and executives who provide the resources and conditions for their furious imagineering - and who will impress marketing and audience considerations upon their work. 

So it's no surprise that Pixar movies recapitulate the creativity-vs-bureaucracy trope over and over again, given their tense relationship with Disney for most of their existence (and now even that they're in the Mouse House, the trope still persists with UP!). And the stories of James Cameron's fuck-you attitude to his Hollywood paymasters, particularly as he pursues new technological platforms for visual wonders, are well-documented. 

You also have to consider that persistent overlap between counterculture and cyberculture described by Fred Turner - for example, the way that Burning Man becomes the paradigm event for Google employees, serving as a utopia of autonomy, creativity and ingenuity. The crew of scientists (headed by Sigourney Weaver) who work for the human corporation in Avatar are an instance of this overlap. Of course, they are an analogue to the embedded anthropologists who are currently at work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who have often accompanied American adventuring (and one shouldn't underestimate how much the American public's war-weariness shapes the radicalism of Avatar's narrative). But they are also the geek-squad par-excellence - chain-smoking female scientist, white and nerdy linguist, super-cerebral Indian neurologist, all building avatars that help you enter into the imaginative world of others. Analogue to the filmmaker and his team of obsessives, I'd suggest. 

There's even a scene in the movie which refers to what you could call classic hacker politics. That's the moment where Weaver's head scientist is remonstrating with the corporates and soldiers as to where the real wealth of Pandora lies - and it's not the energy-providing mineral deposit called 'unobtanium'. "The Na'avi are hooked up to nature, they are part of a planetary network - imagine what we could learn from them if we lived with them, observed their ways..." This netological idealism - exemplified currently by writers like Kevin Kelly, but rooted in cybernetics and the philosophies of McLuhan and Teihard De Chardin - is at the core of the hacker belief system. The response from the corporate boss is salty - "what have you people been smoking!?" But from the tech-hacker angle, it expresses precisely the kind of linear, hierarchical narrow-mindedness that you'd expect from bottom-liners, money-men and top-brass strategists. 

So the secret ideological drama of the digital movie spectacular is: highly skilled tech-creatives against the executive suits.  But given that...

2) What does the Hollywood SF movie prepare us for? Where Avatar is most deeply radical - in the sense of getting to the root of our selves - is in its post-human banality. A future in which transgenic chimeras - the human/Na-avi "avatars" of the film's title - are brewed up in tanks, ready for use in exploration, diplomacy or war. 

The Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Some rough but subsequently edited speaking notes for my presentation to the Creative Clusters conference - organised by the Huddersfield Media Centre, and taking place at the stunningly beautiful Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Delighted to meet you all - be great to hear any responses in comments below, or directly.

The Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

I'm fascinated by the premise of your event: what makes for a good 'creative cluster', that is, a place, space or locality where cultural industries can flourish?

Certainly as a working musician in Glasgow I know the enabling conditions of a good 'creative scene': a vibrant gig circuit, a density of art schools, music courses and big universities, a non-panicked official attitude to a culture of hedonism, many urban zones for convivality, public display...

But another enabling condition is a sense of trust and reciprocation between musicians: favours and collborations are as much a 'social' currency as money. I think we can look at 'clusters' of hackers/new media, fashion and design, and say the same thing. 

So there are some growing rules and disciplines that guide what makes a creative scene, which can then be the foundation of creative industry - Richard Florida's three t's - talent, technology and tolerance - are to me still pretty good advice.

But I've become interested in the deeper roots of creativity. What justifications can we find in human nature - in psychology, biology and anthropology - for a visionary creative industry policy?

I picked this up from your own Creative Cluster conference website: "businesses that trade in creative goods and services often have a profile that is hard for government and investors to recognise, and their needs can be very different from those that trade in physical goods"

Creative-industry policies may indeed seem to the outsider to be lacking in obvious outcomes, or involve a degree of imprecision or process, or seem to willfully flout a certain disciplined use of space, time and resources.

It's my contention that play's role in human development is a new foundation for much creative policy. In our justifications of creative sector policies to the wider world of financiers and politicians, we need at some point to stake a claim about human nature. That we at least might be able to start thinking of ourselves as not just homo et femina economicus, but also (and perhaps increasingly) homo et femina ludens.

Parenting the Play-Kids? A "play ethic" for the BBC

This is a paper for the BBC's R&D department called "Parenting the Play-Kids?", which is my suggestion of what a "play ethic for the BBC" might be (I've already made a stab at this a few years ago). It's triggered by some academic research the Corporation did on youth engagement with their online services (the papers are hotlinked in the essay below). The final "newspaper" (available here as PDF) also has some splendid contributions from online experts like Bill Thompson and Stephen Heppell (you can also e-mail request a physical copy). As ever, all comments welcomed below.

PARENTING THE PLAY-KIDS?

The net is one big playground for kids, a space where they can productively fool around with ideas, identity and media. Should the BBC join in? What can Auntie do for the Playful Generation?

For any modern parent, it's a familiar scene. You stand over your children's shoulders, however covertly, watching as their nimble fingers flutter over the keyboards, nunchucks and touch pads of their digital devices. An Arsenal-themed Powerpoint sits under three separate browser windows – one for chat, one for music sharing, one for Bebo or Facebook.

Someone's sending links of pics for the Powerpoint; fingers flutter back a rebuke, adding their own snippet of information-plus-emoticon. (The mobile intrudes regularly into the exchange, an angry buzzing fly trapped in a tin). And like some kind of domestic water-feature, the sports or cartoon channel shimmers, murmurs or explodes at the other end of the room, the tv merely an ambient input – or waiting to be turned into the full spectacle of a console game.

Yet strip out the flashy and mutable interfaces of these technologies, bracket off the sheer plenitude of material available to the digital child, and what kind of behaviour do we have here? Nothing too far, I'd suggest, from the classic moment of play – that developmental scene present in most human societies that have achieved some distance beyond scarcity or sheer survival, and can thus provide a surplus of toys and materials for their irrepressibly ludic young ones. 

Despite the hi-tech means, collages are still being made here, songs are still being sung and learned, teasing and hazing is still being conducted (across the input boxes), intensely imagined worlds of heroism and camaraderie are still being constructed and explored (frame by frame, level by level).

It's not that our children aren't 'digital natives', whose amateur (i.e. passion-driven) literacy and facility with ICT presents such a challenge to less hyper-mediated educators, broadcasters and parents. It's more that play, in the very way it constitutes our basic, complex-mammalian humanity, has itself always been digital – if by 'digital' one means the ability to compose and recompose culture and experience, with absolute combinatorial freedom, using abstractly redefined elements and materials.

The evolutionary urge and animus of play is to serve what the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith calls "adaptive potentiation". The very principle of variation that play seems to stand for – all those ways of 'taking reality lightly' that stretch from the crudest jokes to the most elaborate glass-bead games, from dressing-up to situationist art – functions to aid human survival and flourishing.

Our play moments generate hypotheses and possibilities, rehearsing us for the complex business of getting along with other complex, linguistic and self-conscious human animals. But play also delivers an emotional payoff, primarily optimism and hopefulness. We get a surge of positive, coping feelings from the games we construct, enlist others to, and try to succeed at ourselves. We are energised by the simulations we build by ourselves and with others to address some deficiency, or mitigate some challenge, in the real world. This child-like, but not necessarily childish indefatigability (or "neoteny", as the academics have it) is a particularly essential survival trait.

If this is the deep meaning of play in human socio-biology, then what becomes particularly powerful about our digital platforms and technologies is that they actually match, map and mimic the essential variability of play to an unprecedented degree. These children may be such 'digital natives' because they might well be the first generation of humans whose 'playful nature' has been given such powerful and appropriate tools of virtualisation, recombination and communication. Their phantasmagorias of play can now be made into robust worlds and environments, in which the playmates are numerous and global, and the experience can be as physical (eg the Wii console) as it is pixellated.

This will certainly be a generation of children who expect to manage their company's inventories via game consoles, or do their five-way business meetings via smart mobile phones. But their natural embrace of networks-and-digitality may have deeper, perceptual consequences. As the futurist and programmer Marc Pesce said in The Playful World a few years ago,

our children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days.

A generation demanding that their material and social world remain as pliable, as infusable with imagination and desire, as their childhoods: is this a step-change to be welcomed or feared? It seems, at least, to be a possibility we should be prepared for.

The Man in Our Mirror: Michael Jackson

This is a piece written 24 hours after Michael Jackson's death, and commissioned by my old newspaper, The Sunday Herald in Scotland.

MICHAEL JACKSON: THE MAN IN OUR MIRROR

By Pat Kane

Sunday Herald, 28 June 2009

THE misty black-and-white clip has been opening most of the televisual retrospectives for the last few nights, and to me it's the alpha and omega of Micheal Jackson. We're somewhere in the mid-sixties, and someone's on their knees with a camera in a murky Motown audition room. The band's cropped off at the chest, and all the universe is looking at this motion-blur of a boy. 

He's a compressed James Brown, in almost every way: the box-shaped 'fro, the tight tailoring, the carnal mathematics of the dancing (part robot, part boxer, part libertine). And that voice – impossibly percussive, a rythym section unto itself, wringing melody out of the tightest of corners. 

But in any of his early performances, you have to look closely at young Micheal's eyes. They are large brown pools of stillness, uncreased by any of the tell-tale signs of excess passion or abandonment, even as he throws out those startling extemporisations of larynx and limb that rightly took him to global fame. 

Look at this most naked of talent-in-the-meat-factory moments - with his ruthless father-exploiter Joe Jackson behind him, and the relentlessly aspirational regime of Berry Gordy's Motown ahead of him. Look at Michael. Right at the heart of this briar patch of virtuosity, ambition, brute commerce, punishing self-discipline - you're wondering who's looking out of those eyes. Is he utterly calm and self-possessed? Or is he utterly null, his soul the property of others? 

Cut to his last ever recorded interview, with an ABC news reporter only a few days ago, on the planned O2 concerts in London. "To do this you have to sacrifice your life, your childhood", he enunciates clearly, the timbred voice of a fifty year old evident through the crackle. "It's giving up your life for the medium". 

As the narrative begins to coalesce around Micheal Jackson's death – that of a weary, chronically unwell, stressed-beyond-imagining mature man, whose body finally rebelled against the regimens of performance and enhancement it had been subjected to for far too long – we need to keep in mind that lithe, strange little android, shimmying across the rehearsal tape. 

What was it like to be Micheal Jackson, from the beginning to the end? To "give up your life" – from that very tenderest of moments where his self was beginning to form, till the end of his complex, wracked adulthood – "for the medium"?

The Internet as Playground and Factory (3): play, cybernetics, Twitter, Iran

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.

The internet as factory and playground (1): the travails of 'fan labour'

This is the first contribution I've made to a fascinating group of thinkers and activists called the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), whose organiser Trebor Scholz is organising a conference in New York in November on 'Digital Labor: the internet as factory and playground', which I hope to attend. It's a fertile space, generating much thought and insight, so I'm going to share my postings here. (Apologies in advance - it's an academic space, so Specialized Jargon Will Be Deployed Occasionally). 

THE TRAVAILS OF FAN LABOR*

In terms of a debate about whether users' interactivity with net platforms is a form of exploitation of labor (in the Marxist sense), I'm aware that I might be living a somewhat schizophrenic life. In one domain, I'm a working musician who is part of a UK "legacy" act from the 80's, Hue And Cry. Since our relaunch in late 2008, our strategy has been to use the enthusiasm of online fandom to reanimate our "brand", by using flexible and media-rich social networks (particularly Ning) to capture the passions raised both by our new music, our live performance, and other traditional outlets of media exposure (radio, TV, press).

 In these sites – particularly the Music Club- we actively encourage and facilitate all kinds of 'fan labor' (cultural note: our biggest hit was called "Labour of Love" in 1987, more inspired by Gramsci than Bateson). This can include: cam-phone audio-visual recording from gigs; giving fans the opportunity to suggest and vote on songs they'd like us to perform and record; allowing fans to upload their own covers of our songs. 

But this doesn't include a lot of emergent, spontaneous activity that comes from the users' own ability to generate sub-networks and forums of their own, within the Hue And Cry Music Club site. We don't charge subscription fees to the site (like many other bands), and we have a programme of regular updates of audio-visual content produced by my musical partner and I – again, freely streamed. 

There's much to say about this experience – which I hope to share at the NY conference in November. But in terms of kicking off this debate, the core point might be that our presumption has been that we're dealing with a radically counter-commercial audience and environment – one in which digital networked distribution of music has driven its price point to effectively zero, and in which that music has almost become a kind of 'community currency'. By that I mean a system of exchange whose value accumulation is fan enthusiasm and commitment, rather than straightforward monetary rent from IP-identified saleable objects. (Although as Spotify, Last.fm and other outfits show, a licensing system may be a possible recommodifier of music consuming habits, though with the pressure of 'free' keeping overall revenue much lower than the heydays of CD sales). 

So in terms of making a living, we have fallen upon the maxim "use what is ubiquitous to drive people to what is scarce" – ie use the ubiquity and tending-towards-free circulation of digital content to raise awareness about those real-world moments of spatio-temporal enclosure (the gig, the meet'n'greet, the music workshop) whose boundaries can be controlled, and thus commodified. (Our refinement on that is to create our own 'ubiquitous' commons of Hue And Cry music within the Music Club – 'reterritorialising', to no doubt misuse Deleuze, the deterritorialised flows of digital culture).

It's not that we don't try to sell recordings anymore – we do, and we are doing so, though the objects these recordings are attached to are way beyond the old CD, and are more lifestyle/luxury products with music inserted, an extension of our "brand" across non-musical physical objects. But our working presumption is that recorded music, because of digitisation, networks and their innovations, is always under a huge gravitational force dragging it towards free usage.

And just to be clear, I come at the question of what value is being realised by commercial platform owners by the free labor of users from a small-business perspective – as artists seeking some kind of income from our endeavours and enterprises. We are rights-holders in our own small company, who seek to use non-commercial, part-commercial (the usual social platforms) and fully-commercial (ie larger distributors and syndicators) networks to promote our music, both recorded and performed.

Commercially, I should be agnostic-ironic about what networks are best for that purpose. But civically, I'm a supporter of the 'innovation commons' of the Net a la Lessig, and would resist any attempt to tamper with the basic end-to-end architecture of the Web (ie, to create tiers of net access with protocols restricted, for whatever reason). 

I guess I have to stake out my petit-bourgeois, mixed-economy, social-democrat traders' identity at the beginning. And what I'm looking for from a conference/discussion on 'the internet and playground and factory' is a new political economy of the Net that can find a place for creative and sustainable cultural enterprise, within this complex landscape (as Yochai Benkler says in the Wealth of Networks) of market, state and 'sharing' economies. 

I feel that the answers may lie as much in welfare and social policy. That is, what kind of social provisions and support can be made for a 'general intellect' now active throughout society, as the Italian Marxists say? Does a four day week or a citizens' income more effectively answer our anxieties about our affective and cognitive 'lives' pouring into these networks, than a discourse about how our free labor benefits Google's bottom line?

*with concessions to the American linguistic imperium

Hiding from the apocalypse (in the Great Pagoda of Funn): On Donald Fagen

I fear that if I start writing about Donald Fagen/Steely Dan here, I won't stop for days… But in order to extract this particular tune from my brain, I think I'll have to do some blog-therapy (otherwise known as 'the typing cure'). 

This song – which, just to compress the argument, is the most meticulous and moving post/pre-apocalypse pop song I've ever heard – is Fagen's The Great Pagoda of Funn (lyrics), from his recent Morph The Cat album. (And thanks to the neo-comm glories of current music culture, you can hear it streamed here on Spotify. Or you can buy it, if you're that way inclined. Go on! Play capitalism - it's a cool game!). 

I'm under no illusions about why I generally love Fagen's work. For one thing, if your own deep musical conditioning is split three ways between post-be-bop jazz, organic 70's rock'n'soul, and classic Brill Building songwriting, then Dan/Fagen brings them all together for you perfectly. (You also have to trust a guy who says "my idea of a great gig is four guys on stage in cheap suits blowing away with their backs to the audience".) For another, beginning with the name – Steely Dan was a large mechanical phallus in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch – Fagen (and his writing partner Walter Becker) give you the nod that they are going to be extremely literate and ambitious in their lyrics. 

And thirdly… well, I'm 45, and I'm pining for certain ultra-sophisticated experiences I once had in New York and Los Angeles in the 80's and 90's. And no-one does the ennui arising from East and West Coast big-city ultra-sophistication like Donald Fagen. Listening to that snarky, adenoidal whine, I am immediately returned to wise-guys, lounge-lizards and merciless conversationalists that I once knew, feared and sometimes loved, in streets called Melrose and Bleeker. 

But this song, The Great Pagoda of Funn, actually gets under my emotional plates (not an experience actually encouraged in the poised, sometimes ruthless world of Fagen's lyrics). It's best seen in the context of Fagen's solo albums over the last two decades, which are a beguiling trilogy. The Nightfly in 1982 was a dreamy, synth-jazz vision of his young adulthood (yet with some sharp satire – 'New Frontier' was about making out in your father's bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden). 1994's Kamakiriad was a sharper, funkier SF fantasy – the usual tangle of implacably mysterious women and penthouse-meets-pavement shenanigans, set in some future-topolis that sounds like it was designed by Al Gore (cars powered by hydroponics, where "the frame was out of Glasgow… the tech is Balinese"). 

Yet go forward 12 years to Morph the Cat, and the mood is much darker. The cover artwork tells the story. On the Nightfly, Fagen's having fun pretending to be a DJ at the foot of Mt. Belzoni. On Kamakiriad, he's a pouting video projection in his techno-car. But on Morph the Cat, he's sitting morosely in what I assume is his New York apartment, the light falling on him from outside the window, which he seems unwilling to look through. 

Yes, it's a post 9-11 record, very explicitly. And though many of the songs directly address the experience of living in the America of Homeland Security (state surveillance and coercion in "Mary Shut the Garden Door" and "Security Joan"; coping with a climate of fear in "Morph the Cat" and "The Night Belongs To Mona"), it's "The Great Pagoda of Funn" that's the artistic triumph for me.

Oh, it's a weary, weary song. It starts up with a compendium of Fagen's favourite musical moves – a boom-chick four-on-the-floor beat, with his usual Ellingtonian layerings of horns and chords – but the mood is very sombre, funereal. Over this stately procession comes Fagen's usual ironic squeak, but carried by a melody that's very close to the kind of elaborate construction you'd get from a Billy Strayhorn or Shirley Horn. We're deep in the shades of historic Manhattan here: Fagen's channelling the more elegant aspects of this city, as they sail through that apartment window. 

But even though "summer's over, there's a strange new music in the street". And Fagen isn't alone in this room: he's secreted there with a loved one. They're trying to do the John Donne thing, make that "one little roome/an everywhere" – because outside, in the world after the fall of the Twin Towers, all is disordered and alienated in their beloved city. The citizens of Gotham are going through the motions of normality, staring and grinning "to help maintain the state we're in". In Fagen and his lover's eyrie, they "make up their own storyline" – but it's a precarious project. The effort required to keep this "house of light" illuminated is enormous: one careless word can unravel their Decameron against the darkness.

And what happens when that happens? It's at this point you know you're listening to a master songwriter/arranger. The song soars into a pristine modulated doo-wop: they've failed, the flame's gone out, and they're now in the world of

poison skies
and severed heads
and pain and lies…

…of psycho-moms
and dying stars
and dirty bombs…

You can barely hear the semantics of this, so lovingly wrapped in harmony and sheen are the vocals: it's a desperate beauty, a hipster wrapping his taste and sophistication around the very worst, aware of how doomed to failure his efforts will be. The chorus completes on chords that (I'm sure) are deliberately trite, and on a line ("Let's build a world together/in the Great Pagoda of Funn") which neatly combines sheer sentiment, and painfully self-conscious wackiness. Fagan and his love are holding themselves together with fantasies and caresses, in their bemused, enfeebled (and enfabled) state, however many stories up in their tall, ultimately indefensible Manhattan tower. 

Around all this, of course, there is the usual Fagen-esque foliage of virtuosity - for some a vice, for me always a virtue. Soloists on guitar and trumpet get their chance to participate in the song's overall conversation, and their evident thoughtfulness and awareness of the themes they're playing to increases, for me, with every listen. 

Nothing can be solved in a pop song - but a pop song can open up the world, can at least help us to feel how important the problems are. There are a few artists who try to do that with their music (Costello, Waits, Cohen, Mitchell, Prince, Radiohead): they're the ones I return to, time after time, for sustenance in murky times. And Fagen sits on the top of the pile, like a dyspeptic, Pynchon-reading monarch. A play-ethicist supreme.  

"To play and to fight": what's half-right about El Sistema

This column in the Guardian today has jolted me into writing about the phenomenon of El Sistema, the Venezuelan initiative that uses the personal discipline and collective commitment of orchestra-playing to raise the ambitions of impoverished kids. Here's a summary of their approach taken from the website of the forthcoming documentary movie. It refers to the educational methods of El Sistema's founder, the deeply charismatic José Antonio Abreu:

According to [Abreu's] approach, musical perfection is not the first priority; instead, from the first day on, what’s important is being able to play together with others. The children are integrated into orchestras from the very beginning, and the older children pass their knowledge down to the younger ones. Abreu’s intention and philosophy is concealed behind this simple concept: for him an orchestra is first and foremost about togetherness, a place where children learn to listen to each other and to respect one another. The purpose of the work is the integration of the children into a united social structure, in which each individual assumes responsibility and contributes to a commonly achieved result.

Charlotte Higgins' column is trying to say that the British system of youth orchestras could borrow from Abreu's communitarian idealism (indeed there's two initiatives abroad already, in Scotland and England). But I'm intrigued by some of the comments to Higgins' piece, which confirm some of my anxieties about the transferrabilty of El Sistema. 

I'm completely for the union of play and craft. But shouldn't we also validate those who make elaborate journeys into sound through pop music - who use, calibrate and master their synths, samplers, turntables and software? I wonder also whether El Sistema's slogan - tocar y luchar, to play and to fight - derives its particular edge from the passion of those in the impoverished South to fight for the right to claim ownership of the European classical tradition. (And whether it's this that ensures such adulation from the likes of TED, the developed North's elite at its most expansively inclusive, as Jaron Lanier has written). 

I don't doubt for a second the positive impact that such a journey into mastery (and self-mastery) has had on the hundreds of thousands of kids that have gone through Abreu's youth orchestras: this commentor on the Guardian article confirms how magical the experience is, deep in the heart of the barrios. And I support the initiative in the UK of stern musical modernists like my countryman, James Macmillan, to make the encounter with orchestral music as ubiquitous as possible in contemporary schools. 

I've also worked with too many jazz musicians in my life - some attendees of schools like Berklee and the Guild Hall, some just obsessive practicers and fingerers - who are entirely committed to their technique, and its progress. Artistic excellence I'm not opposed to. 

But I think the lesson to be drawn from El Sistema is that we should seek to build 'systems' of social action, that can extend the collective and individual joys of cultural mastery. I just think we should be open-eyed and eclectic about where we establish those systems. 

For example: Shouldn't the compulsive gamer from the wrong side of the tracks who might want to be a compulsive games-maker also be able to find a supportive environment like Abreu's orchestras? An environment based on respect for collaborators, adherence to excellence, the transmission of knowledge down the generations? And the same for the fashion designer, the chef, the poster-maker, the social-network builder... I've always been struck by the way that hackers and free software advocates evolved a "hacker ethic" - excellence-meets-mutual-support - around their constructions, which seems as 'classically orchestral' as Abreu's vision. 

In short, let's praise El Sistema for its tactics and philosophy, but not necessarily for its content - and particularly not the idea that its content implies the philosophy, imputing some kind of higher improving power to the European classical tradition. (And again, to be clear: one of my biggest buzzes in life is to listen to a live classical orchestra - I'm not being inversely snobbish here). Abreu has said: 

Originally art was made by a minority for a minority. Then it became art by a minority for the majority, and now we are at the beginning of a new era, where art is intended by the majority for the majority.

Bravo, maestro... as long as we are suitably flexible about what kinds of elaborated cultural practices count as "art". 

Shaken in the big warm fist of leisure: the extremes of Thorpe Park

I've been to Thorpe Park – the UK's third biggest thrill park - several times now with my various children. This time I decided to sit it all out, and devote my remaining funds to my two young thrill-seekers, who each got a FastPass and thus threw themselves upon every vertiginous spiral they could find, several times each. Thanks to judicious monitoring of food input, there was no chundering or heave-ho-ing as a result, and they left the park six hours later distinctly weary, but with whirlpools faintly visible in their eyes. 

What I like about Thorpe Park, as opposed to the perfume-scented, suburban totalitarianism of the DisneyVerse, is that it's mostly about the physical thrill. There are some desultory attempts at 'themeing', all on an American-Graffiti early-fifties shtick (god knows what that meant to the Grime-listening young masses that day). And there is, of course, the Saw ride – thrill-riding for a post Abu Ghraib world (of which more later). But generally, rides like Stealth, Nemesis: Inferno or Colossus are all about being held very tightly and securely, and then being thrown around violently at high-speed.

For someone interested in play as a phenomenon, it's this precise experience that gets you. These are children, young adults and adults reliving that experience of being thrown around by their parents – the swinging round, the sudden dropping down, yet tightly controlled by a mother's or father's arms (represented by the sheer engineered solidity of the harnesses, the unfailing safety routines of the red-shirted employees). 

What's interesting is that this isn't the elemental mammalian scene of play – parents watching at a distance while the cubs test themselves out – but something much more direct in terms of power and control. The tingle here is "don't drop me daddy". And the cast-iron, road-bridge-style enormity of the Thorpe Park rides gives you security that they won't fail you, even as they're corkscrewing you at 60 mph. 

This is a precisely calibrated art, as Brendan Walker from Aerial, a 'thrill engineer' who presented at the Cambridge conference (previous post) wittily demonstrated. Walker even presented a 'thrillological' equation and graph, showing how ride designers manage the sweet spot between risk and predictability. 

But it's the deep passivity of the experience that I suppose was making me melancholic in the Staines sunshine, as libidinous teenagers cartwheeled about me (yes, that might also have contributed to the gloom). 

It's not that vertigo and great leaps into space aren't part of the play experience. This was the insight of Roger Callois, the French Surrealist-fellow-traveller, in Man, Play and Games. His games of ilinx were

based on the pursuit of vertigo and consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.

Yet compared to the street-running/parkour boys we saw doing their stuff at the South Bank in London a few weeks ago – measuring carefully (and not without some evident fear) their jumps from roofs to the wall of a walkway, with a 30 foot drop below – the ilinx of the Thorpe Park experience is scripted, almost bovine. Even with FastPass tickets round their wrists, enabling them to get four or five shots each at the scariest rides within the course of the day, my kids ended up in a state of mild ennui. Their last-minute pining for the cheap wall-climbing feature was equivalent to that Xmas day moment when the toy's ignored, but the packaging compels.

Well, go to a climbing park then, you might say, if you don't want to be spatially chucked around by the oppressively padded fist of themepark leisure. I have watched my youngest – a natural thrill-seeker – swing about 100 feet above me in Glasgow's X-Scape leisure park: she was securely harnessed, but still able to step gingerly through thin air. It got so bad to watch I had to bury  myself in half a movie while she was up there. But in terms of the government's advice that we should allow more physical risk in children's lives for their developmental benefit, I do feel like a good citizen when I see my precious youngest throw herself into tree-climbing and wall-walking – and don't over-fuss her about the inevitable injuries.

I didn't feel remotely like a good citizen when I agreed to queue up for about 90 minutes (no FastPass here yet) to get onto Thorpe Park's big summer draw – a ride based on the "Saw" series of horror movies. I'm tempramentally opposed to these movies – been hanging around with too many loving-kindness advocates these days – but was surrounded by one kid (14) who'd already seen it (it's an 18 certificate), and my daughter who is compelled, in a Grimm Fairy tales way, by anything gothic and creepy. So, we got in line, hoping that conversation and iPods would get us through the wait. 

  

I haven't been as discomfited by a leisure experience in years. Like all theme rides built on a franchised brand, the Saw ride aimed to materialise the screen experience. So we were slowly funnelled though a maze of chain-mail fences, topped with fake-but-convincing razor wire. We shuffled along our path like sports-wear-clad concentration camp victims, heading for the vast corrugated-iron storehouse that contained the ride. As we went along, we passed by seemingly random chunks of machinery – clamps, spikes, saws - sitting in stagnant brown pools of rust. "That's the stuff the evil puppet uses to torture his victims", said the older boy, sotto voce, even though my daughter was lost to Lady Ga-Ga. "Really, you don't wanna know." The musak in our ears was fragments of panicked American voices trying to get out of traps they seemed to have invited on themselves.

And over all this, screens showed images of Billy the Clown, the mode of communication for the movie's serial killer, Jigsaw, with the invitation: "let the games begin…" I've looked up the premise of the Saw franchise, and it seems to be part of a trend of movies entitled "torture porn" (I've seen the billboards on buses, and usually avert my eyes): many critics place them within the context of domestic terrorism, Abu Ghraib, the increased sense of daily extremisms generated by our Gulf Wars. Even in the queue, I began to realise Saw had a ludic premise. Jigsaw, a figure made murderous by his own losses and ailments, seeks to subject his victims to various self-mutiliating "games", all of them tied to some lifestyle or character defect deemed by Jigsaw to be in need of remedy. (And if they don't fix it, they die). 

I've mused before on how the dark-side of play – that "taking reality lightly" which allows for all kinds of possible actions, all realisations of the imagination – is startlingly visible in the Abu Ghraib photographs: the hapless Lynndie England and her cohorts, jovially making living piles out of supine and naked Iraqi prisoners. The ludic as servant to sadism was here too: as we shuffled towards the ride, Billy the Clown started to appear on a video loop, incanting his pestilential version of a play ethic (or perhaps more accurately, play homiletic). 

I was about to get grimly pessimistic about the ability of hyper-capitalist life to turn anything into a commodifiable experience - self-mutiliation, character reform, even the creative potential of games and play. I stopped when I realised I was in a queue almost entirely composed of teenagers: those constantly mutating monsters who, at the very least, have an alarmed relationship with the fleshy eruptions of their own bodies. You know, this may pre-date commercial society by quite a stretch...

I also recalled that only a few days earlier, I'd been listening to an In Our Time radio documentary about the Brothers Grimm – and how their original 'family tales' contained as much decapitation, dismemberment and grisly transformation as any torture-porn movie. Bruno Bettleheim once wrote of the "uses of enchantment": the way that these often gruesome, despairing fairy-tales gave children a symbolism for grappling with their own anxieties about being in the world. 

As I relentlessly and volubly deconstructed the whole experience leading up to the actual rollercoaster, for the benefit of a daughter getting visibly more freaked out, I was genuinely worried that the ride itself would be a trauma too far. Actually, for all of us, it was a moment of bathetic relief: one stagey animatronic of the nasty puppet, a few unexpected blasts of air and water (a la the old ghost train rides of my youth), and in the end an all-too-briefly-vertigious rise and fall in the comfy-tight cradle of our carts. 

And what did my wards think of it? Their responses have to be recorded precisely: "Totally scary… totally brilliant!!" Compared to the routine convolutions of the other rides, they'd been energised and made positively chirpy by the Saw experience. What came to my mind was Brian Sutton-Smith's latest thinking on the meaning and function of play, in the American Journal of Play:

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.

As we gabbled away between us, walking out of this chintzy horror-fest, it was clear that we'd experienced exactly that form of play. We'd occupied our tight cradles of thrilldom, and defied about as much symbolic "depression and danger" as you could imagine. (Though there were indeed limits to those symbols - there was specific carnage churnng away in the minds of those who'd watched the movie). 

The only suitable response was to head for the ice-cream stand, and laugh about how shoogly the "scary" puppet was. And for me to quietly shake my head at this topic of mine, the sheer complexity and ubiquity of play, and how much of life it encompasses.