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.
The Herald, August 28, 2004
Playtime Bell Has Rung
Pat Kane toils over the history of the Protestant work ethic and finds the inner player has a vital role. By Colin Donald
Pat Kane believes that Protestant-derived western capitalism has crippled our souls as hideously as the bound feet of ancient Chinese woman, and that only by prioritising fun over grind can we realise ourselves. Reading his work, crammed with dense theory, is a tough session in the gym rather than a Frisbee on the beach, but with the same invigorating effects as the workout.
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. Discourse studded with those celebrated Kane-isms make that leap more formidable sometimes; how about “I’ve always gloried in the democratic energies of the public park” or “The experience of work at the Sunday Herald created too much cognitive dissonance for me”. Snort if you must, but 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 on 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.
The point of this book is to explore why the Protestant work ethic, adumbrated from everyone from nineteenth-century mill owners to Gordon Brown, has failed to keep its promises of human happiness, and how it no longer suffices as a template for a post-industrial, technologically enabled society. It celebrates the achievements to be gained by liberating the inner player, and charts the success of those who have tapped into this new spirit, from the Lego corporation to Linux. “We need”, he asserts, “to become more conscious of the players we already are”. Kane’s thesis is strengthened by the enormous negatives it opposes. The first is personal-historical: the experience of his father, a British Rail clerk who “sang like a Hoboken angel” but who sacrificed his personality to tedious (and eventually redundant) clerical routine, transferring his own soulful dreams to his talented sons. By doing so he defied the deadening workplace culture of West Central Scotland, and imbued the young Pat with a Hamlet-lie thirst for revenge against the corporate Claudius.
The second is the shadow of 9/11, which Kane presents as slowing down the momentum towards a more play-oriented future, “closing down the play of counter capitalist possibilities that had been bubbling since [the anti-globalisation protests of] 1999.” Al Qaeda has easy familiarity with communications technology that “neophiliacs” used to consider as benign to the point of hippiedom. They have spoiled the easy evolution of ever-more-playful technological fraternisation, and by doing so have increased the stakes for bringing the play ethic into the realm of politics and work.
The book is strong on lively examples of individuals and corporations who have embraced the play ethic – an infinitely expandable concepts – weaker on economic analysis of how a “ludic civilisation” might work or what political leadership or us players can do to expedite it.
Kane talks non-pejoratively about the “sickie” culture that loses more labour days than the strikes of the 1970s, seen not as shirking but as exercising their rights. The underlines a weakness of the book, that among the rhetorics of play (play as progress, play as imagination, play as power, etc), he fails to acknowledge any downside to play as sitting on your arse all day and hijacking virtual cars on Game Boy. You don’t have to be Samuel Smiles to ask if Kane’s utopianism could engage less dismissively with uncool concepts such as productivity.
As a manifesto, The Play Ethic shares some of the militant vagueness and selectivity, as well as the righteousness of the anti-capitalist protest movement, whose pranksterism he applauds. Unsurprisingly, he is for the individual against the command-and-control society, while acknowledging that the play ethic depends on a secure and well-protected society that is necessarily a firmly-controlled one. Another example of a flashy vagueness in the politics is his invocation of Trotsky’s writings on what a socialist future would look like. These days, the glamour of a Trotsky reference needs to be offset by reference to his far more significant writings about how such a society must be achieved by deliberate terror.
Because of the human terror tendency, achieving the utopia of a play-centered culture through peaceful means still remains in the domain of the poets and dreamers. Kane has constructed a massive and elaborate conceptual bridge to that domain. Burns sums up the passion and the far-futurism of the Play Ethic in his Letter to William Smellie (1835), the most affecting of the book’s epigraphs: “In some future eccentric planet: Where Wit may sparkle all its rays,/Uncurst with Caution’s fears:/And Pleasure, basking in the blaze,/Rejoice for endless years!”
The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living by Pat Kane (Macmillan, £12.99).
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