Production and the Culture of Play

For me, and I think for Cage, Hardt, Negri, and Derrida at least - and probably others but definitely not everyone - what's at stake in all this sweating over theory and resistance is the preservation or maybe emancipation, or even deployment of play (depending on what stage we think we're at with play in our lives, if arriving at a diagnosis like that is even useful...). The problem with saying something like that is that resting on something like play obviously begs an outline of that thing: what exactly is play? Or maybe better - and a little more slippery - free play?

I think, like Chomsky says (I might be misinterpreting him, but this is what I hope he means) we need to be brave enough to act with incompletes - that is, we need to leap into control as far as we are able of the production of justice, even though we haven't arrived at Justice - and, of course we may argue that the entire idea of arriving at a coalesced thing Justice is both impossible and dangerous, etc etc: have your poststructrual field day here. So: I don't know what Play is any more than I know what Justice is, but in the spirit of theory complementing action, here's some grasping at a distinction that seems to me like an entry point for action.

Play, I think, is in danger of being confused with consumption - and I think that danger is largely due to influences of capitalist ideology. (Surprise! ;-) ) Play, I think, is a critically active and productive mode or pursuit or whatever. When I think of play, it's Cage developing strategies for sound, or it's my bud kev crafting a prototype for the compilation we're putting together, or it's Zizek watching Casablanca and cooking up his bit about Bogart and Bergman's sex and not-sex. The last example is where I think the danger slips in. The ideology of capitalism is such that value lies totally in the act of consumption - or at least, that "something more" that products promise is contained directly in the act of consumption. Consumption isn't the spark of a process, or a step along the way, it's a necessarily self-contained bubble of value: it not only doesn't require any response, I'd argue it encourages unresponsiveness - a kind of reverence for its doing a good job of providing the experience of consumption.

So, here maybe is a good place of distinction for what I think are the most exciting activist trends right now: institutions, loose collectives, products, and other mostly capitalist ephemera that not only leaves open a door to active production, but pretty much demands it. That's what I think the mark of play is: production. The production of an object, a community, or a discourse, whatever - but an active and critical production.

I read about a system that won an award at Ars Electronica which I think is a nice disruption of consumption - it makes a kind of injection of play into normal consumption. It's a website where you can enter the barcode of any product, and it will identify undisclosed ingredients, and provide access to a critical discussion about that product or its components. The idea is to eventually have support for cell phones, so you could go to the store, use your camera-phone to scan a barcode and read about some mysterious chemical listed on the side of your cereal, or whatever. This is an active kind of culture - it makes a space for play.

Now - already I think capitalist ideology and methodology is trying to swallow up what I'll go out on a limb and say is an explosion or at least the initial tremors of a culture of play. There's a television station that sells advertising by the year to companies like Sony, who don't then provide advertisements for their products - the station runs ads that it asks its viewers to make. I'm worried about things like that, the danger here is claiming play in the name of consumption, and remaking play so that it works for consumption. That TV station seems great - but I really doubt you'd see a spot about Sony that takes a critical position towards the company the way you might on youtube for example. What there will be is an ad that is at commercial quality, in the language of consumption, that uses the power of play to validate itself: "someone just like you made this themselves! it's part of who you are!"

I think one of the most important things to do right now at a time where the internet is in danger of losing its freedoms is to actively claim a culture of play, and deploy it in the face of consumption.

digitalization and slum-living

No time for commentary, off to work (in the wake of international worker's day!) but Zizek has made this point elsewhere, and I think it's fascinating - I hope not in any fetishistic way, but who knows. In a talk that you can download here he sets up the potential for new ways of living at the intersection of digitalization (and Gibson's cyberpunk novels come up here) and poverty/slum-living. I couldn't find a better quote, but he touches on the idea here:

While one should resist the temptation to elevate and idealize the slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class, it is extremely surprising how many of their features fit the old Marxist definition of the proletarian revolutionary class. Even more than the classic proletariat, they are “free” in the double meaning of the word—“freed” from all substantial ties and dwelling in a free space outside state and police regulations. They are large collectives, forcibly thrown into a situation where they must invent some mode of being-together, while simultaneously deprived of any inherited ethnic and religious traditions.
[...]
We should be watching the slum collectives for signs of new forms of social awareness: They will be the seeds of the future.

The article is here, and the mp3 is here (search the 2004 mp3 page for Zizek, he's buried a bit near the bottom of the page).

Temporary Services

There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will. [...] If we are thinking of social transformation or social revolution, though it would be absurd, of course, to try to sketch out in detail the goal that we are hoping to reach, still we should know something about where we think we are going, and such a theory may tell it to us. [...] It is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we're very far off the mark. - Noam Chomsky in conversation with Michel Foucault, 1971

I think critical theory can learn something from this position, and from experimental science (as far as I understand it anyway). In physics, it seems to me, that the best theoretical physicists and the best experimental physicists would make Foucualt happy - they never allow themselves to feel too confident about the axioms they deal with, and test everything again at every chance. I think of Richard Feynman especially when I say that, but I'm sure if I knew more about other good scientists (lauded and invisible both) it would apply to them as well. So the best physicist is in a sense, a wonderful post-structrualist: self-reflexive, metacritical, ready to deconstruct in the face of ritual and common sense. What Chomsky opines to Foucault, though, and what I think is often the missing frosting on the cake of deconstruction, is this kind of boldness to say "okay, we have a pretty good idea what we're after, lets take a step forward and be ready to shift directions along the way." Chomsky is talking about constructing theories - but what he's after is an out-of-the-laboratory wielding of shaky theoretical terms like justice for example. As ready-to-break as the concept may be, we have to be bold enough to push it beyond its limits into practice and action - always looking to the laboratory for the new ready-to-break model.

I'd like to try to tie together a few ideas that seem to me to resonate well together. To start, here's a list:

• Cageian free play. Cage's zen aesthetic of no-aesthetic or maybe, all-aesthetic, was futuristic - he was invested in the idea (that is becoming material) that technology would bring society into a position where its primary activity could be peaceful and spontaneous free play, rather than a struggle for survival. I wouldn't call it so very different from Derridian free play, though Derrida might be utopian in a different sense - the practical impractical utopian.
• Empire and the network of the multitude. Negri and Hardt set the stage for free play - or, at least, the potential for it. Empire is built on an infrastructure that could support free play, but while a push towards the repurposing of Empire is imminent it is probably in its infancy.

Activist culture, I'm happy to observe, when it isn't apathetic (that's an odd too-common phenomenon, apathetic activism...) is wonderfully and loosley pointed in the above direction. The network is the operative concept in art and culture it seems - and this network is exactly the infrastructure I mentioned that is giving up so much promise of an in-this-lifetime (maybe) free play. Check out the group Temporary Services for evidence.

I listened to an interview with Michael Hardt (Empire co-author) a night or two ago, and the interviewer asked him why he and Negri were so recklessly optimistic. He pointed to a long tradition of communist and activist optimism - of treating defeats as the seeds of victory. He brought up Marx's metaphor of the mole burrowing and burrowing with every action, positioned to break to the surface. I'm optimistic.

Radical Verses

I had a conversation with Melanie last night about activist methodology. For this project I'm working on, format and tone is important - I'm working on it for selfish reasons, but I'm also hoping to contribute to the already bubbling discourse on aesthetics and life - so I'd like to find a way to present my ideas that won't come off abrasively.

This morning, reading through the Dhammapada, I realized that it was a wonderful model of a radical activist work. Here's a bit from it:

Those who take the non-real for the real and the real for the non-real and thus fall victims to erroneous notions, never reach the essence of reality.

Having realized the essential as the essential and the nonessential as the nonessential, they by thus following correct thinking attain the essential.

So, for now, I'm working with the idea of writing an essay, and then boiling it down into verses, and repeating for every section of this project. I haven't been able to let go of that traditional essay format entirely - I'm a parenthetical statement, constant footnote kind of guy, I need to work with a rhizome of interconnecting statements - but the idea of pairing essays with clean (at least on the surface) verses seems like just the right thing. Douglas Hofstadter did it in his own radical activist work, Godel, Escher, Bach, with his pairing of essays and fantasy dialogs.

And Cole Swenson seems to be doing it in her poetry. Radical verses seem to have just the right amount of ambiguity and room for free play - though, I'm still a fan of the complementary essay. (Swenson scholars seem to be too ;) )

Structuring Aesthetics

I'm going back to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire now that I have the time to give it the attention it deserves. This is the first step into a project I hope to spend a few years on, and that will hopefully materialize at some point (or several points) as an essay or a book - or maybe a generative web-based installation, we'll see what the best format will be. The project is essentially driven by a question that has bothered me for years - since I began to look at what I do creatively in a critical light.

I'm interested in taking a que from Foucault, to examine the patterns and ripples surrounding the production of aesthetic objects. I'm using all those words in a really broad sense - by aesthetic object I mean a painting or a song as much as I mean a community or an event. I'm interested in the deep structure of functional aesthetics - that is, I want to look at how art and artful practice (ideally in the spirit of Derridian play, or Cageian play, but also the artful practice of propaganda, coercion, and other manifestations of power for example) are components of living, how they might produce meaning, or how they might be symptomatic of ideologies. It seems to me that the aesthetic and the functional can't be seperated, and that I'll need to look at one as a component of the other, and the other way around - Myer and I have had some nice discussions on this topic. It also seems like the conflict between the self and the multitude, or the self and the other will be a rich area to look into. I'm launching out from a Marxist base because it feels the most solid - we'll see where I might land.

Wherever it is, I want to arrive firmly in the arena of the real - that is, i'd like to develop a methodology by working through these theories. I'll say plainly that I'm working with an activist's mindset, and I want to come away from this with a toolset I can utilize in my creative work and elsewhere.

After I finish Empire right now I think i'll move onto A Hacker Manifesto - Wark's definition of a hacker as an information producer, and a special emerging class in the information age rubs me the right way.

(ps, i was lucky enough to find the same photo i used the last time i posted about negri, but with more of negri's office visible - hopefully that will be a nice complement to my understanding of his book this time around. i'd like to see a little more of his office ;-) )