[Fwd: Re: [iDC] Re: A critique of sociable web media]

[Julian Kücklich]

pat kane schrieb:

> Julian: I hear your charge - play is the new work - and I only half 
> accept it. Sutton-Smith's rhetorics of play (which you quote) really 
> attempt to show how play should not be confined in its meaning to "fun, 
> spontaneity" - it's a principle of social cohesion and social evolution 
> as well. To the question, 'so what *isn't* play then?', I often answer 
> that 'care' isn't play. Play keeps us in a permanent mode of dynamic 
> engagement with others - but it requires energy and vitality, what 
> Sutton-Smith calls a "neonatal optimism". I think we should also be 
> allowed to be exhausted, to be fragile and respond to fragility, to 
> attend to our mental and physical finitude as much as exult in our 
> semio-technological infinitude.

I take your point about Sutton-Smith: I think he describes the idea that
games should only be fun as the "rhetoric of frivolity" - and I would
not want to propagate that kind of rhetoric either. I am not saying that
games should necessarily be unproductive, or that work should
necessarily be nothing but productive. I think there's nothing wrong
with a blurring of the boundaries between work and play per se. What
worries me is the ideologisation of play, and the fact that this
ideology is used to harness the free labour of players - whether they
are aware that they are playing or not.

I find the concepts of exhaustion and fragility that you introduce to
the discussion quite interesting, though. In the 19th century, leisure
was invented to reproduce labour power -  after a long day's work in the
factory, leisure provided an antidote against exhaustion. But excessive
leisure can of course be quite exhausting as well - it is common to hear
people complain that they need a couple of days to recover from their
holidays. So leisure and play involve a form of exhaustion as well, but
it is unclear what would provide an antidote to the exhaustion of
leisure. But I do not think it is the "semio-technological infinitude"
you speak of provides this antidote, in fact I think there is no such
thing. Everything is finite, even semiosis, at least if you follow
Peirce. And the older I get, the more I tend to agree ...

> I've recently become aware of just how Enlightenment my position is - 
> indeed, Scottish Enlightenment: the Adam Smith of the Wealth of Nations 
> (or as Benkler might update it, the Wealth of Networks), arguing for the 
> upheaval and transformation of social and economic relations - and the 
> Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a necessary corrective. 
> Play as the wealth of networks/nations/markets, care as the basis for a 
> new theory of moral sentiments. Now we can have a long argument - with 
> Chomsky as my back-up - as to how Adam Smith has been misread over the 
> years... maybe not here....

I suppose Adam Smith provides a great example of how you can have the
best of intentions, and still cause a lot of trouble. I've been told
that Smith had all his manuscripts destroyed shortly before he died.
Maybe he was beginning to see the ramifications of his thinking ... If
anything, this is an argument in favour of my anti-Enlightenment
position outlined briefly in my last post to the list. An anecdote
related by Giorgio Agamben about his meeting with Guy Debord illustrates
this quite well:

"Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I
believed to be about political philosophy, until at some point Guy
interrupted me and said: 'Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a
strategist'. This statement struck me because I used to see him as a
philosopher as I saw myself as one, but I think that what he meant to
say was that every thought, however 'pure', general or abstract it tries
to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus
captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency."

(from: http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben4.htm)

> My only other objections to your points on game-labour, is that it 
> surely depends on whether the relations and means of ludological 
> production (hi Karl) have been made sufficiently explicit and 
> politicised. The only person I know who's doing this for games is the 
> Scot Simon Yuill, in his Spring_Alpha project, which is a test-bed for 
> building up his Social Versioning System, which aims to tie the creation 
> of game-worlds to community education and activism. 
> http://www.spring-alpha.org/pages.php?content=about. Any other examples 
> more than welcomed.

This is pretty much what my own work is about - externalising the means
and relations of play-labour (or what I like to call 'luditudinous
production' - yet another useless neologism). I didn't know about
Yuill's work, so I will certainly check it out. I like the basic idea
because the website says that players are able to "re-write the code
that runs the simulated world" - from my point of view, that is a
deludological project, but I don't want to impose my terminology on
other people. But I take your point - most projects that use games as a
form of intervention are too content-oriented and don't leverage the
potential of ludic structures to involve people in processes that they
might see as beyond their control. Still, I don't think this is about
awareness, but about strategy in the Debordian sense.

- Julian.

p.s. What difference does it make that Adam Smith and Simon Yuill are
Scottish?


-- 
julian raul kücklich, ma

http://www.playability.de