Play Journal

Play and Craft: review of Richard Sennett's 'The Craftsman'

I was delighted to be asked to review the social thinker Richard Sennett's new book The Craftsman for the Scottish Review of Books. I have devoured his last four books - Corrosion of Character, Respect, The Culture of the New Capitalism - because I share his concern with the subjective and social effects of new technology and new business models. Though we come to ultimately different conclusions. Sennett believes we can revive an ethos of 'good work', even in the age of flexible occupations and networked capitalism. I believe that the same conditions push us forward to forge a new ethos of productivity and creativity, one that accepts - even embraces - a degree of open chaos and emergence in our lives: a 'play ethos'.

What is fascinating about The Craftsman is that Sennett is now directly engaging with play, and our essentially playful natures. He believe that the 'universality' of our early play experiences - our relentless experimentation with material stuff, our commitment both to the rules of games, and the bending of them - is the basis for his belief that we can all be potentially craftsmen (and craftswomen). Our childhood show we can easily be deeply invested in our activities, incrementally improving our mastery of the world. In a beautiful phrase - invoking the Jeffersonian ideal that democratic competence resides in the skills we exercise to change our material conditions - Sennett suggests that "good citizenship found in play, is lost at work".

I post the entire review below - which has a personal dimension for me, as various parents and grandparents of mine have had a complex, even troubled relationship to an ideal of 'craft' - and invite your responses.

Rules of the Brain - Keep It In Play

Been alerted by an American publicist to a very well-produced website for a book called Brain Rules, written by an enthusiastic scientist called John Medina. The interesting bit is 'Rule One - Exercise', where the claim is that our sedentary, physically static school-and-work lives are the least amenable environments for learning and productivity. This reminds us of our other American play-associate Frank Forencich, and his 'Exuberant Animal' fitness consultancy, which is similarly rooted in a background of evolutionary psychology and biology. Tied in with the NYT piece below, clearly a lot of interest in the physically and mentally restorative dimensions of play in the US at the moment.

New York Times... gets play big time

The New York Times recently published what looks like a front-cover Magazine article on play, covering all the significant scholarly figures in the filed (Stuart Brown, Brian Sutton-Smith), and focussing very much on the biological-psychological dimensions. A classic quote here from Sutton-Smith:

Why would such an enriching activity as play also be a source of so much anarchy and fear? Sutton- Smith found one possible answer by reading Stephen Jay Gould, the author and evolutionary biologist. The most highly adaptive organisms, Gould wrote, are those that embody both the positive and the negative, organisms that ‘‘possess an opposite set of attributes usually devalued in our culture: sloppiness, broad potential, quirkiness, unpredictability and, above all, massive redundancy.’’ Finely tuned specific adaptations can lead to blind alleys and extinction, he wrote; ‘‘the key is flexibility.’’

What Gould called quirkiness, Sutton-Smith called play. ‘‘Animal play has been described by many investigators as fragmentary, disorderly, unpredictable and exaggerated,’’ Sutton-Smith wrote, and ‘‘child play has been said to be improvised, vertiginous and nonsensical.’’ The adaptive advantage to a behavior that is multifaceted, then, is that pursuing it, enjoying it, needing it to get through the day, allows for a wider range in a play-loving person’s behavioral repertory, which is always handy, just in case.

Playing might serve a different evolutionary function too, he suggests: it helps us face our existential dread. The individual most likely to prevail is the one who believes in possibilities — an optimist, a creative thinker, a person who has a sense of power and control. Imaginative play, even when it involves mucking around in the phantasmagoria, creates such a person. ‘‘The adaptive advantage has often gone to those who ventured upon their possibility with cries of exultant commitment,’’ Sutton-Smith wrote. ‘‘What is adaptive about play, therefore, may be not only the skills that are a part of it but also the willful belief in acting out one’s own capacity for the future.’

Play is how we shape the world with our minds

From the World Question Center at Edge.org, Alison Gopnik on how she's re-evaluated the role of play and the imagination in human cognition:

I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability. I said as much in a review in Science and got floods of e-mail back from distinguished novel-reading scientists. They were all sure fiction was a Good Thing - me too, of course, - but didn't seem any closer than I was to figuring out why.

So the anomaly of pretend play has been bugging me all this time. But finally, trying to figure it out has made me change my mind about the very nature of cognition itself.

I still think that we're designed to find out about the world, but that's not our most important gift. For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Look around the room you're sitting in. Every object in that room - the right angle table, the book, the paper, the computer screen, the ceramic cup was once imaginary. Not a thing in the room existed in the pleistocene. Every one of them started out as an imaginary fantasy in someone's mind. And that's even more true of people - all the things I am, a scientist, a philosopher, an atheist, a feminist, all those kinds of people started out as imaginary ideas too.

I'm not making some relativist post-modern point here, right now the computer and the cup and the scientist and the feminist are as real as anything can be. But that's just what our human minds do best - take the imaginary and make it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world.

Ephemera: 'Dialoguing Play'

Things move passing slow in academic life ... but the estimable Steven Linstead has just sent me the final printed results of my 2005 York University Management Department seminar on the Play Ethic and Organisations, which has turned up in official and edited form (PDF) in the wildest academic journal of organisation studies I know of, Ephemera. I'm thrilled to see that my exchange sits right above an interview with Bruno Latour, one of the most challenging social theorists around. This is not a read for the theoretically and lexically light-hearted, so apologies in advance.

Dancing in the Streets

My review of Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy has finally appeared in the Independent (the unedited version is in extended post below). It feels great to encounter so much post-Puritan, post-work-ethic scholarship these days. And though I think Barbara's a little too optimistic about the power of collective joy, especially in the face of the incredibly sophisticated strategies of the leisure corporations - see my Joga Bonita post a few months back - the book is overall a great back-up to the Play Ethic, and in particularly the theme of 'play as identity' it picks up from Brian Sutton-Smith.

Creature discomforts

Thanks to Jonathan Rutherford for sending me a copy of my review (PDF) for the forthcoming edition of Soundings, to which I contributed an essay on play a few months ago. The book was Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (Lawrence and Wishart). It really focussed my thinking about the impact of what could be called the 'complexity' sciences - to which I can now add 'biosemiotics' - to my understanding of play. And what a vision of a thoroughly  'communicational' human nature might (or might not) enable politically.

Though I am critical of the social and political prescriptions the book draws from its utilisation of the science, I must give tribute to Wendy for pulling together such disparate material, in such an accessible and passionate way. Her book demands many strong responses, and is at least much more diversely sourced than most of those riding on the 'well-being' bandwagon at the moment (see below).

True Mutations

Thrilled to find that my 2001 interview with the estimable left cyber-libertarian R.U.Sirius has made it to a new paperback out in the US, called True Mutations. I'm in there (talking about play) with many other highly (dis)reputable neophiliacs - indeed in my section, 'An Open Source for the Self', I am sandwiched in between Genesis P. Orridge, the late Robert Anton Wilson, Richard Metzger, Daniel Pinchbeck, Howard Bloom and D.J.Spooky. I have never felt so happy to be among such peers (though just slightly creeped out also).

R.U. is also a burgeoning podcast titan, with his shows on the Mondo Globo Network, which are feeding automatically to my iPod as I speak. His blog, Ten Zen Monkeys, is a superior entity also. Anything he does is thoroughly recommended - his personal mix of stoner diffuseness, and Frankfurt-school analytics, is quite irresistible.

Soulitarian City @ Urban Learning Space

One of my favourite partnerships around the Play Ethic is with Urban Learning Space, Glasgow's 'learning lab' (in the style of the MIT Media Lab), situated in the city's beautiful design centre The Lighthouse. I've produced two papers for them, and fully support their ambition to re-think learning models in the light of new technology, urban mobility, youth culture and the politics of well-being. I did my latest seminar for them, entitled Soulitarian City, and they've now been open-source enough to put the material on the web for full access. The paper is accessible here (pdf file), and Powerpoint presentation is here. If you're a visiting academic in Glasgow, I'd thoroughly recommend attending their seminar series, if you have the time.

Soundings essay on 'Power of Play'

Small update from earlier this year - my lecture at the Brisbane Festival of Ideas has been turned into an article in the excellent culture and politics journal Soundings, slightly adapted and extended. I'd very much recommend you buy the publication, particularly for Zygmunt Bauman's essay on utopia, and a few others. In the meantime, here's a PDF of my own essay, with thanks to Soundings.