A big keyword for today

This is an edited transcript of a talk given by Pat Kane at a

discussion entitled State of Play in September 2008 at the
SLG which explored whether play was a marginal or
mainstream, a form of resistance or conformity.

I wrote a book called The Play Ethic, a manifesto for a different way
of living - a modest ambition for a 400-page volume! It was an
attempt at a sequel to a book that some of you might know if you've
done social science: Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the spirit
of capitalism, written at the turn of the century. I thought, "well, if
we're in age of informationalism, what would the spirit of this era
be?" The play ethic was, in part, a stab at answering that question.

There are a few regular themes I use when I'm talking to

organisations, companies, educators - trying to get them to think of
play as not just a trivial, but a mainstream ethos. There are various
historical markers you can place, in terms of how play moves from
the margins to near the centre of the developed West: they can
date either from the beginning of the 20th century (with movements
like Surrealism), from 50s/60s counter-culture, or from the advent of
the Internet. But let me start by talking about where I think play is
today, for those constituencies who explicitly adopt its languages.

Advertising clearly has taken up play as a positive term. It would be

easy to put together a montage of large companies that have used
the word "play" and "playful" explicitly in their advertising copy and
slogans. What's quite interesting is that the language of play, the
semantics of play, the idealism of play, is often used for products
that have quite mature, saturated markets. Play is often brought in
to sell cars or mobiles or digital cameras, things that people have a
lot of already. Advertising has to work pretty hard to get you to buy
another one: play is clearly a big attractor.

There has always been a confusion of play with leisure - I'm very
very much at pains to distinguish the difference between them.
Leisure is what you do when you don't work, when you're re-created
for the Monday morning to Friday afternoon grind. I think play is
something different; play has more of a sense of being active,
something more elemental to who we are as human beings.
Advertisers are picking up on that, and on quite a general shift in
values - towards what I would call "post-work", and which has been
growing more and more in the developed West as we get more
affluent, and people feel less determined by old traditions and old
structures.

Much sociology tells us that we are becoming unboxed socially -

reflexive and autotelic in the words of Anthony Giddens - and play
floats into this environment as a way to articulate that
unboxedness. Playfulness is a signifier that the times we live in are
more free, more liberal, more open. Vodafone, for example, have
used scenes of play explicitly to advertise their mobiles: their
catchphase“Make the most of now". That's a profoundly playful
notion: if everything, your whole life is in play then your it's filled
with possibility. A seductive message for advertisers to beam out to
people who are already over-extended in their credit: play will help
to realize your mobility and your expressiveness and your sense of
sheer possibility in life.

The second group of people who pick up play quite explicitly are
socio-technical communities. These are people like computer nuts,
hackers, coders, musicians and creatives generally - people who
compulsively go to, or put on, creative scenes, festivals. People who
tie together a community via a technical practice or craft, where the
mastery of that craft is an expression of the spirit of that
community. These people have a very explicit love of play as an
ethos.

For these socio-technical communities, play is the celebration of

being autonomous rather than heteronomous - that is, determining
for yourself the values of your community, through your voluntary
actions, rather than those being determined by work, major
institutions, politics, law, whatever. There's a wonderful old art
theory from the 80s, concieved of by Hakim Bey, called T.A.Z.: the
Temporary Autonomous Zone. There are lots of socio-technical
communities who love to create these TAZ's - for example, at raves,
or the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert, flash mobs doing
crazy things in the street.

I don't think you can disconnect the acceleration of this kind of

activity over the last ten years from the rise of the Internet as a play
space par excellence. The net isn't just a playground, it's a ground
of play, it's a big structure - something like a great public library
meets a great public playground.

There's a guy called Lawrence Lessig who calls the Net an

"information commons" - a shared space that enables innovation.
The way the Net is structured - in Lessig's words, as an "end-to-end
network" - is simple enough to allow people to use it to express
themselves, rather than the Net itself directing what people do: a
zone with lots of fantastic tools in it that enable lots of diverse
activity.

So the very arrival of ICT in our lives is really changing the

metaphors we have in our head about how society progresses and
develops. I think it'ss a very profound change. Because Net culture
is definitely supporting a spirit of playfulness, that sense of being
open for possibilities, amidst these open networks that make lots of
connected things happen.

The third set of people who explicitly use play, and identify
themselves as players, is enterprise and business culture - strategy-
wielders at both ends of society, the penthouse and the pavement.
Think of the city "player" and the street "playa" - both quite
sulphurous styles of aggressive masculinity, loving the idea of
taking risks with resources. (Here's where we come to the question
of the gendered dimension of different styles and investments in
play...and we won't hang about there. Too complex, sometime later
and elsewhere!)

Between enterprise culture, and the hacker/socio-technical

communities, we cover two extreme polarities of play: at one end
the team players and co-operators, at the other rampant egotists.
The latter player has disdain, or is purely cynical about, all those
social connections that the previous group of players like. So again,
think of play as a strange, potent, diverse, fertile element of the
human condition - not easily trammelled down moral guidelines, one
way or the other.

Lastly, the fourth use for play is as a fuel for education, or to use the
horrible term "social capital" - improving the social utility of human
beings, in all their unpredictable creativity. I've been involved in a
lot of this activity over the last five or six years. I've worked with
education departments, looking at the disjuncture between the
humanistic, exploratory experience of education - and the non-
playful jobs that exist in the labour market. The culture that kids are
bringing to the school - a joyful, messy interactionism - doesn't
really fit them for the world of work as currently arranged.

Let's be honest about it: this is play understood as a route to health

and efficiency. And it's a part of a long historical traditional You all
know about Montessori schools, Steiner Schools, Froebel's
kindergartens -and these stemming from the texts of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, his whole notion that the original energies playfulness
can be harnessed to drvie the healthy, productive citizen worker.

One has to be a wee bit suspicious about a New Labour government

invoking play as health and efficiency for the modern Briton. Maybe
surprisingly, I always quote Al Gore here, a chapter on play in his
book Joined At The Heart. Gore says that play is useful for a society
that needs people to constantly upgrade their skills and
competencies, respond to the next wave of technological
development, respond to the next injunction that comes down from
head office. Play is functional for people who have to constantly re-
programme themselves to be suitable for the twenty-first century
marketplace. Gordon Brown says one of the Great British virtues is
fair play. True, but if Gordon Brown and New Labour are setting the
rules of the game, then on one hand it's granting£200 million
pounds to encourage exuberant usage of play parks, and on the
other hand they're micro-controlling the behaviour of young males
in estates through ASBOs and curfews. There's some contradictory
thinking going on there around play.

So there's my attempt at a kind of general context for why play is

quite interesting for people who are interested in social, economic
and cultural development. Just to throw some final reference points
at you: let me recommend Brian Sutton-Smith, generally regarded
as the dean of play theory. In The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith
talks about seven rhetorics of play - some which are about total
egoism and freedom, and some which are actually about play
meaning an ultimate submission to greater powers.

Take the National Lottery: what could be more submissive as an act

of play than buying your ticket, faced with these impossible odds,
and whispering "I hope it's me tonight?" You're literally throwing
yourself at the mercy of capricious gods. Recall the opening ad
campaign for the National Lottery, where the giant starry hand
comes out of the sky, glides over the streets from a Dickens-eye
point of view, and eventually comes to the lucky punter's window,
points, and booms: "It's you!"
Sutton-Smith takes a very multidisciplinary, psychological-meets-
biological approach to play says. He believes that play helps you to
adapt to the variety of challenges that a human being faces in his or
her environment. Play literally exists in our evolved human nature to
spin out and test out possibilities for living. To me Play is as big a
keyword as Love, Democracy, Justice. And I think when Play
gravitates towards the centre of a society or culture, that's an
important moment.

So is play a form of resistance? It can be. Can also it be the most

subtle seduction into conformity and complacency? Yes, it can be
that too. How should artists use play? Well I would have thought a
bit like holy fools. The most interesting art that relates self-
consciously to play says that it's about forging an art of living. How
can we see the artfulness in - by which I mean the non-inevitability
of - economics, politics and civics? A radically playful art sees all
structures up for grabs, and has the imaginative confidence to
remake them and recast them.

ends