The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living PDF
Preview The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living
to the net she’s everything 2 me We refuse a world where the guarantee that we will not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom . . . We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity. – Raoul Vaniegem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1967 It doesn’t matter what I think – it plays. – John le Carré, Tailor of Panama(film), 2001 CONTENTS INTRO TOWARDS THE PLAY ETHIC ONE NEXT MOVE: The Birth of a Player TWO A GENERAL THEORY OF PLAY THREE THE ANGELS MAKE WORK: Putting the Protestant Ethic Behind Us FOUR RISE OF THE SOULITARIANS: The Net, Digitality and Play FIVE LIFESTYLE MILITANTS: Women, Children and Men at Play SIX WISDOM LOVERS: An Education for Players An Education for Players SEVEN THE PLAY AESTHETIC: Arts, Media and Play Values EIGHT FROM BUSINESS TO ‘BUSYNESS’: The Management of Play NINE PLAYING FOR REAL: The Politics of the Play Ethic TEN THE INFINITE GAME: Play and Spirituality OUTRO Beyond the Play Ethic ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS NOTES SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX Surely by now we know what play is: what it means, when it happens; what it means when it happens. The puritans have been telling us since the Reformation that play is at best trivial, at worst demonic and at the very least not work. And if we use the word to describe the boundary-challenging, reality-defying, insanely optimistic, relentlessly experimental activity of children, then we usually think we know what we mean by ‘play’. Play can be beautiful, silly, perplexing, simple, funny, surreal. It can be distracted or obsessed; and it always seems to slip away from the standard rules of measurement, through being either too inconsequential or too diffuse. But we usually trust that it has been confined, at least; kept to the margins of our competently functioning adult society. Play is something childish, something we have put behind us, and something we only allow ourselves to recover in moments of permissible excess. And when we do play – enjoying it, not regretting it, letting it take us over – we make our excuses. Surely play is so exceptional, so beyond the everyday norm, that it can have only a temporary rather than a permanent effect. Surely this is where (and when) we’re allowed to break free from the ethical, the humdrum – from the anxiety of ‘how we should live our lives now’. Surely we should be thankful that play can do that for us, at least. Can’t we just leave it there? Why do we need a ‘play ethic’ of all things? A play day It only takes one day of considered reflection – as we move through our city streets and surf our cultural resources, as we converse intimately and impersonally with others, as we dream and scheme, plan and imagine – to realize that this account of play is deeply impoverished. The earliest etymology of the word gives us our cue to move onwards. The Indo- European root behind the Old English plegian, a root also found in Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and possibly Latin, is dlegh, meaning ‘to engage 1 oneself’. To play is to engage oneself. As a first step to seeing beyond the trivial, that sounds about right. Let’s take this particular day – 28 April 2003, spent mostly at home, in my neighbourhood in the West End of Glasgow – to briefly measure the presence of play in my own daily experience as a writer, musician, father and citizen. The most obvious way to begin is to do what I’ve been doing for years now – by noting the way that the concept of play, even the word itself, seems to be one of the great unarticulated metaphors of our times, informing public discourse of all kinds, from the most apparently substantial to the most obviously trivial. From the start, this day has been a richly ludic Tuesday indeed. In fact, it’s easier to begin my search for examples of play at the grandest levels of power, money and realpolitik, than in the foothills of fun. War games, at the moment, are not hard to come by. The recent conquest of Iraq by a non-UN-mandated alliance of the US, UK and a motley crew of other suppliant nations still mostly dominates 2 my morning papers. The lead story on the front page of the Financial Times (which joins the UK’s Guardian and the Scottish national the Herald as my usual daily newspapers of choice) is this: ‘Blair warns Chirac on the future of Europe’. The headline leads to a wide-ranging interview conducted with the British Prime Minster. Blair’s warning is that the French ‘vision of a multipolar world’ (President Chirac’s notion that Europe should be a rival to the US) is ‘dangerous and destabilizing . . . You would end up reawakening some of the problems that we had in the cold war, with countries playing different centres of power off each other . 3 . . [it is better] to have it out in the open.’ The Guardian runs two stories on the same geopolitical theme, both hingeing on ludic metaphors. In an analysis on the divisions between ‘old’ Europe and ‘new’ Europe (US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s attempt to distinguish post-communist European states from France and Germany), a Czech foreign minister comments that ‘there has to be an integration in Europe, but an integration built by all the players, not by 4 one or two’. The journalist Ian Traynor notes that Eastern Europe ‘was turned into a playground for the feuding Americans and West Europeans’. An Op-Ed piece in the same paper puts into perspective the Bush
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