Play dead?

One of the blogs I check regularly is Play Journal by Pat Kane. I know Pat because in the late 90s he was put in charge of a section called Scotgeist in the Glasgow Herald, and commissioned me to do a few think pieces and some arts reviewing for it. (There are musical connections too: Pat was one half of 80s Scottish plastic soulsters Hue and Cry, and we were introduced by 90s one-hit-wonder Jyoti Mishra, the man behind White Town's 'Your Woman'.) In June Macmillan UK will publish the book Pat has been working on for the last five years, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. The blurb says: 'We all think we know what play is. Play is what we do as children, what we do outside of work, what we do for no other reason than for pleasure. But this is only half of the truth. The Play Ethic explores the real meaning of play and shows how a more playful society would revolutionize and liberate our daily lives.'



Now, there are a lot of reasons why this message resonates as strongly with me as it does with Pat. First, we're both Scots, and Scotland has been marred for many centuries by a particularly joyless form of Calvinist puritanism which made 'play' the repressed element in the work / play binary, condemning 'players' to eternal hellfire. Secondly, we're both socialists, moulded by Marxism to think in terms of 'the working class' and homo faber, man the maker. Confronted by the apparent defeat of Marxism in our lifetimes (I say 'apparent' because I think Marx's ideas are on the way back, but more of that another day, perhaps when I return from my trips to Russia and China!), we've both had to finesse and develop our basic ideological outlook. In the 80s, unwilling to become some sort of Billy Bragg figure, I consciously mixed Freud and Bataille in with my Marxism. The cue for this came from some classes I was gatecrashing at the LSE when I first arrived in London: Christopher Badcock's Psychoanalysis of Society, which put capitalism on the analyst's couch with the same detached and meticulous intellectual aggression with which Marx had put it in the dock of the proletarian court.

In the 90s people like Pat and me had something new to mix into our post-Marxism: 'the digital revolution'. Play and leisure grew in importance. The 90s was a decade when slackers and idlers, surfers and skaters, loungers and players came into their own. The economy started popping into surplus, there was a playa-fabulist in the White House, you had Stereolab and Pizzicato 5, Wallpaper* with its 'global nomads' and Wired with its 'zippies' and its 'long boom'. The way we saw it, computers and global trade were going to be levellers and democratizers, lowering the threshold of entry into a culture of pure play. Sure it was frivolous, but if everybody could benefit, if we allowed everybody to play, why not? Suddenly the smart money seemed to be on Johan Huizinga as 'the new Marx'.



Huizinga, whose seminal Homo Ludens was published in his native Holland in 1938, puts play at the centre of his view of life. 'The spirit of playful competition' he says 'pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.' Huizinga, who wrote this, his last book, under the noses of the occupying Nazis, is critical of the marginalization of play in his own time in commercialised forms like gambling and sports. For him play is a much wider structuring principle: seriousness is not big enough to include play, he says, but play is big enough to include seriousness. Huizinga's interest in game theory makes him very relevant to the computer age, based as it is on modelling, simulation, and the invention of new forms of social interaction (especially virtual communities) based on play.

If I had to sum up the spirit of my 1990s, I think I'd pick a single day in 1996. On that day I went to Amsterdam with my wife Shazna (at the time a hostess at Cyberia, the internet cafe in the Pompidou Centre in Paris). We met up with my New York friend Regina Joseph, editor of the CD-ROM magazine Blender, attended a conference in a converted gas tank about digital media and culture, met Louis Rosetto, founder and publisher of Wired magazine (Wired was born, like Huizinga, in playful, liberal, loose Holland) and ended up eating space cakes in the red light district with brilliant digital culture writer Douglas Rushkoff, author of Playing The Future (1999).



It's not the 90s any more. Is play still the future, or is play dead? Everything -- but everything -- has changed since 9/11. Whether we like it or not, a new agenda has been set by the neocons and by Bin Laden. We are nervous, on the defensive. Security, travel, visas, all have been tightened and tensed up. The world is no longer our playground. Douglas Rushkoff, that cultural wind vane, no longer writes about games, drugs, technology and the future. His new book is Nothing Sacred; The Truth About Judaism. In it, he transfers his hopes for the internet (dashed by its appropriation by direct marketers, apparently) across to Judaism. 'Like the early Internet,' he writes, 'Judaism is a text only religion... also, like the early Internet, Jewish law and legend is as easy to write as it is to read -- the very definition of transparency.' The new RAM, for Rushkoff, is a ram's horn: the shofar blown to awaken Jews to reflect on past deeds. Such is the flavour of the strange new century we have entered.

This week Londoners were told that a terrorist attack on their city is inevitable. Most people have said they won't change their behaviour. Life goes on. But does play go on under such circumstances? The Madrid bombers put it with chilling starkness: 'You love life and we love death.' Play may be universal -- we all play as children -- but so is death. Are we now headed away from play and towards death? Is play a thing of the past? Were we wrong to oppose play to work when we should have seen that the real opposite of play is death? Does history, like the life of an individual, take us inevitably away from play and towards death?



For a glimpse of what Bin Laden thinks about play, we need look no further than his 2002 Letter to America. 'It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind,' he writes, then cites a list of examples: drugs, gambling, Clinton's love of fellatio, the trade of sex plied by 'giant corporations and establishments under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom'. Osama's puritan condemnation of our carefree, playful side finds more common ground with some of the 'jews and crusaders' he professes to hate than any of them may care to admit: these views are completely consonant with what the Old Testament and the neocons say about play.

So how is play doing? If the world's agenda is being set, in this disappointingly atavistic 21st century, by play-hating neo-cons on one side and play-hating terrorists on the other, is play dead? Is there a way of looking at terrorism as play's darkest, most horrible manifestation yet? Or should we perhaps be looking at Japan, where big play-oriented corporations like Namco are putting the ludic not only at the heart of their product range, but at the heart of their corporate philosophy? (Fabulously enough, Namco has a Homo Ludens Laboratory, named after Huizinga's magnum opus.)

I don't think play is dead, and I don't think death is play. Play is certainly a big part of my future (although I guess death is a bigger part) and I plan to make my next album my most playful yet. When a value as healthy as play gets pushed out by sickness and neurosis, that's when we need it the most. Perhaps we play best in the shadows.

I'm off to play with the Cheburashkas in Moscow now. See you in a few days!