The Play Ethic

Games within Frontiers

Patriotism and play on my mind at the moment...

This one comes from 2003, but I think it's interesting - an analysis of the proposed citizenship ceremonies for prospective UK immigrants. It aims to 'make gaining British citizenship meaningful and celebratory rather than simply a bureaucratic process', in the words of Bernard Crick, the distinguished proposer. In terms of the rhetorics of play, this is truly ancient stuff - the carnival and ritual that allows for membership of a community. But, as ever, to take one form of play for the whole of play is mistaken. How much mental play does this allow? How much freedom is in this play?

Tie this to the positive patriotism expressed in much of the UK papers this morning about Britain's medal haul at the Olympics - with the fabulous Kelly Holmes as exemplar - and you can see why Blair recently took his opportunist chance to re-validate competitive sports in schools. Again, one rhetoric of play predominating - play as power-and-contest, suggesting that the 'nation that plays together, stays together'. Yet what about play-as-fate-and-chaos - the need to live with chaos, failure and fragility? Or play-as-triviality - the right to regard all prizes as finite follies, a 'tinsel show'?

And finally, I noted from the pieces on the new Scottish parliament building in the Herald magazine this weekend, one dominant ludic metaphor: this ornate, almost Gaudi-like building, deeply non-Presbyterian in its style but open and civic in its design, will compel our politicians to 'raise their game' to match their surroundings. Can they be as creative as their new context? Or as global-class? And can they pursue infinite as well as finite games - ie, not just political jousting, but a progressive vision for Scotland in the world?

Play Ethic review in The Herald

Another thoughtful and challenging review of the Play Ethic book by the Scottish critic Colin Donald in the Herald. No live link, so most of it is in the rest of this post (see link below), but I'm happy to take these summations:

The Play Ethic is an outrageously ambitious grab bag of ideas, personal histories and exhortations, requiring a leap of faith in the mind of the reader...Ultimately only the grimmest of Scottish mindsets would hold back from embracing Pat Kane and his gospel of "soulitarianism". The heat and scope of his furiously synthesizing, allusive intellect adds up to an enormous, shouted Why Not?...The Play Ethic is short on prescriptions of what we can do - beyond being aware - to initiate a culture where we identify ourselves through our playing personae rather than our office selves, but even articulating the shift in emphasis makes a big difference. Kane has his head over the parapet, scanning the horizon. For his energy, his openness, his connectedness and his greed for the new, he gets the credit as well as the flak.

You can read the more negative points for yourself - and when I get time I'm going to respond briefly in the comment box to each of these review postings. But excited to be stimulating minds in this way. More to come.

Play Ethic review in Management Today

From Management Today, no less, a positive and (for me) educational review of the Play Ethic book, by the comic-improviser-meets-management-consultant Neil Mullarkey. A sample:

This is not an anti-capitalist tract: far from it. The play ethic is right at home in the 'networked world of informational capitalism'. Look at all those '60s hippies now atop the entrepreneurial ladder. How can we talk of a work ethic when so much is available for free on the net - whether it be Linux software, music or writing?

I used to get frustrated with my economics tutor, who always made us assume 'perfect competition' to make the graphs work. Human beings are not rational economic actors: the reasons for this are more interesting than indifference curves. Human systems are complex; their overall behaviour cannot be predicted, but a spirit of play can cope with this uncertainty.

Emergence and extinction live side by side with competition and co-operation, altruism and selfishness. But it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. In improvisation, if you look good, I look good.

Happy to see these points made - I'm interested in all forms of human interplay and reciprocation, markets included (though my political position on market reciprocation is probably closest to that of Geoffrey Miller).

The gospel according to Disney

From the Guardian. Telling you what every parent knows about Disney - that it's a more effective morality vehicle for children than church, temple or synagogue. "What are the tenets of the Church of Walt? Are there a set of values to comprise a 'Disney gospel'?"

Definitely. Good is invariably rewarded and evil punished. Faith in yourself and, more, faith in some higher power is essential. That is, faith in faith. Optimism and the Calvinist paradigm that hard work is rewarded with upward mobility complete the Disney canon. All of this is presented in a context vaguely implying western Christianity. But curiously, this is a largely secular gospel almost without God or Jesus. Salvation is attained through faith and works, not by grace. There is little explicit Judeo-Christian symbolism or substance in 70 years of Disney's animation. This despite the almost pervasive use of a theological vocabulary: words such as miracle, sacrifice, and divine. It seems a contradiction, portraying Judeo-Christian values without sectarian, or even a godly context - the fruits without the roots.

Is this why manga and anime startles us Westerners so - because we're illiterate about its Confucian/Buddhist cartoon theology? (I'm thinking explicitly of the cartoon that mesmerised me and the girls last year, Spirited Away.)

Citizen Cyborg

Reporting from the margins, before they become the new mainstream... Found the mini-empire of Dr. J the other day - a 'democratic transhumanist', no less. I think this means that he wants all those technologies that put materials and biology 'into play' - infotech, biotech, and nanotech - to be the responsibility of capable, informed citizens, rather than political or commercial elites. Dr.J has a radio-show with some excellent interviews (my favorite being the account of how Brazil introduced a citizen's income), and a book out next month called Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future. He also runs a blog called Cyborg Democracy, which claims as its constituency:

"democratic transhumanists, nanosocialists, revolutionary singularitarians, non-anthropocentric personhood theorists, radical futurists, leftist extropians, bioutopians and
biopunks, socialist-feminist cyborgs, transgenders, body modifiers, basic income advocates, world federalists, agents of the Culture and the Cassini Division, Viridians and technoGaians"

And if the trans-sexuals seem out of place here...well, the people just voted for Nadia. Er, what are the limits of play again?

Les Arts De La Rue

A playful new direction for urbanism and architecture in France, from John Thackera in Icon magazine. Perhaps rather than building expensive architectural icons like Gehry's Bilbao museum - which according to the statistics, visitors tend to only visit once - cities should fund 'les arts de la rue': street-based carnivals and festivals, which emphasize participation from the spectator. The memories are better (and cheaper) than a drop-jaw wander round an architect's fantasy made real. And there's a vision behind this too, according to Jean-Marie Songy, director of the Aurillac festival - it exemplifies what he calls the "open city - the utopian ideal of a city as an open stage that supports freedom of expression". (Nice to note, too, that there's a Scottish town already ahead of the game in this - see Big In Falkirk).

'The Play's the Thing' (Sunday Herald Profile)

I was chuckling away at my profile in the Sunday Herald this week, tied to the release of the Play Ethic book and the event at the Edinburgh Books Festival. Peter Ross is far and away the most witty and perceptive of profile writers in the UK - and as Robin Williams said in Good Will Hunting, 'boy, does he have the goods on me'. But I'm also happy with it as a more-or-less accurate picture of the personal context around the book. The opening is a scream:

There is both less and more to Pat Kane than there used to be. First the less part. He walks into the restaurant on a stormy-then-sunny Glasgow Tuesday looking toned and tanned, wearing the well-chuffed expression of the born-again slim and a jacket he last had on a decade ago. Pinching the left lapel, he announces: “You see before you the raiment of self-actualisation.” This is his uniquely Kaneish way of saying that he has lost loads of weight and is much happier for it. Unconvinced by the deprivations of Atkins (the man loves all forms of complexity, which presumably includes complex carbs), he shed the pounds by examining his consciousness in order to work out why he associated sugar with a sense of well-being, then severing that connection. “The only way I could go on a diet,” he chuckles, “was to do it conceptually.” That’s so Pat Kane. Once famous as half of cerebral jazz-pop duo Hue and Cry, he has become better known as the man with the pointiest head in Scotland, always ready to paint newspaper pages and television screens purple with discussions of dialectics and semiotics.

It gets both harsher and kinder after that. More to come in the next few weeks.

Revolt out of Style

Intriguing piece from Spiked, wondering whether the demise of the style magazine - The Face as the classic example - indicates how low our current social aspirations are, in the bathetic world of Heat magazine and Big Brother. An earlier piece from Andrew Calcutt gets to the nub:

By reading The Face and experimenting with the styles described in it and by it, you too could become a face, a player in an emerging club scene, a legend on your local high street. This could be achieved by your display of universal and authoritative knowledge of life, as distilled into its synonym style, with The Face as your bible. With one hand The Face reduced social reality to the sphere of consumption, while with the other it tried to enable the reader to stand above particular patterns of consumption and to enjoy consumption in general.

Now it's not about ironic cool, but populist heat. I'm ambivalent, though. There's a raw loathing at the heart of the new celebrity media - pathologically flipping with adulation, sure, but at least it's open and unstable. And on the other side, polemicists like Micheal Moore and Naomi Klein serve up equally raw ideology. I was always frustrated by the fastidiousness of the style mags when it came to politics. Thinking about it, this seems like a more honest and dialectical pop-culture now.

Career-topia for Kids

Now here's a classic paradox of child's play: kids just love to pretend to be working adults (in doing so, say the psychologists, they master their masters). Some bright experience capitalist in Florida (where else?) has invented a theme park which allows kids to do this to the max. Wannado City - 'where kids can do what they wannado' - resources kids to be a painter in the morning, a pizza maker at lunchtime, a fireman in the afternoon and star in a Broadway show in the evening. (Or as Marx said: under communism, "I may hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic").

"Everything (kids) are told not to touch in real life, you can," Wannado's Valerie McCarty says in USA Today. "It's exposing kids to various roles." Exposing or imposing? And will they grow up to demand the long-awaited adult version?

Brit-hop

Stylish piece from The New Yorker on why Dizzee Rascal and The Streets can teach American hip-hop a few lessons, in their sheer artful-dodgerly Britishness:

Despite having invented the English language and those clever TV shows, Britain hasn’t withstood our cultural colonization any better than the rest of the world. In the eighties and nineties, British m.c.s generally sounded like variants of their American counterparts. Having an adorable accent didn’t disguise the fact that you’d borrowed your style from Rakim, or Run-DMC, or Nas. The debt is finally being erased. The music coming out of Birmingham and London today sounds nothing like American hip-hop. You can’t even call it hip-hop—though it wouldn’t exist without hip-hop.

Dizzee Rascal provides the intro quote to the Soulitarians chapter of the book: "I come from the Playstation generation... I love creating, creating beats, messing about with flows".