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.