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Title: Play As Rebellion Author: hologram Language: en Topics: revolution, play, labour, anti-work, spectacle, rebellion, fun, work
In his 1985 essay; The Abolition of Work, Bob Black proposes, like Johan
Huizinga and Paul Lafargue before him, that idleness and play, rather
than a sort of unproductive form of slovenly idolatry is perhaps the
most heightened form of individual and collective expression. Black
argues that the issues with corporate oligarchic capitalism on one end
and state oligarchic capitalism under the guise of totalitarian
collectivism on the other hand is that both disregard the importance of
leisure in the productive, intellectual and spiritual lives of the
people.
With an emphasis on work by both the far right, the far left, as well as
within the more centrist/reformist elements of these systems, we are
left with no alternative way of theorizing individual and collective
worth and value. In both systems, corporate authoritarianism and state
authoritarianism, human dignity is reduced to the labour theory of
value, wherein even intellectual, artistic and imaginative pursuits are
rendered as commodities. This is not to say, however that Marxist
analysis is incorrect, indeed, Marxism is perhaps at its best when it
illuminates the level of exploitation of workers by their corporate or
statist leaders. However, the solutions offered by “really existing
socialism” as well as those offered by radical free-market solutions do
not offer a paradigmatic shift away from the modelling of human labour
as a measure of value. The difference as explained by Black is that
“work” is always involuntary, whereas play is by its nature voluntary.
Rather than the expectation of a monetary reward for one’s labour, the
reward is the experience itself. This is, according to Black contrary to
the modern workplace in corporatized America, and indeed, he surmises
that the freedom to pursue leisure in the then-deStalinized eastern
block was perhaps closer to his vision of a hypothetical “State of
Leisure”:
“The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups,
public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished.
Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to
be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a
description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and
libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites.
There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than
there is in the ordinary American workplace.”
In fact, in the years since Black wrote The Abolition of Work, we have
seen an increasing centralization of authority in mid-size to large
corporations. Human Resources departments have become larger and more
integrated into corporate schema, under the pretense that they serve the
workers’ interest. To a certain degree, this is true, but only within
the parameters that the interest of the human resources of the company
align with the best interests of the company leadership, who are not so
much beholden to the well being of their workers as they are to the well
being of their company, which in essence boils down to its fiscal
performance. Is an HR dossier or “file” any different than the file on a
subject under surveillance? Black goes on:
“Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom
is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training
at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the
system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything
else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they’ll likely
submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They’re used to it.”
This theory of stratified hierarchy can be found in Foucault, who
infamously compared public schools in France to prisons. The methodology
at play in the workplace is the same. The impact of attuning workers to
a hierarchy has two main impacts: 1) to increase performance anxiety in
order to keep workers complacent and questioning their job
performance/stability and 2) extrapolate this anxiety and scale it to
the organization as a whole to create suspicion among the lower-level
workers and destabilize their ability to cogently work together beyond
the basic needs of their employer (for instance, to deter talks of
unionization or even genuine friendship between co-workers). Is it any
real wonder than the social lives of people are declining at a faster
rate than at any other time in history?
According to Joe Cartwright of City Observatory, the social realm in the
United States is in a position of “rapid disintegration” as big business
pushes its way into areas that were once the purview of community
groups, churches and volunteer organizations in order to ply consumers
with the need for a busy life scheduled at the discretion of
corporations. Socrates warned us of this present condition in 350 B.C.
when he stated:
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”
In this way, it is true that although seemingly full of content and
plans, a busy life is ultimately a placation of the hierarchy
indoctrinated within us since birth. It sublimates our whims and desires
into a sort of religious zeal for so-called productivity at the service
of profit margins. Non-profit organizations too suffer from this
emphasis on profitability and the exploitation of its workers for the
end goal of fiscal solvency. Even in our “free time”, we are organized
into consumer groups, operating at the service of global conglomerates’
pursuit of growth and profit. Is it simply coincidence that totalitarian
socialism reared its head when tMarx himself was unable to divorce
himself of this theory that the only way to extricate humanity from this
exploitative system was to pursue infinite productivity, but by means of
the workers’ control of their own chains? Marx said:
“the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where
labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is
required”
This realm of freedom is inherently the freedom from work, however one
need not push capitalism to its breaking point of efficiency and
productivity to reach this goal. We could simply stop working. It’s not
a radical idea. It is perhaps the ultimate question, or as Heidegger
would call it, the question of “unconcealment”. How do we unconceal a
world free from hierarchy and labour in service of ever growing
productivity? I believe, like Bob Black and Paul Lafargue, that it
begins with the abolition of work. However, despite Black’s criticism of
Marx not arriving at the final conclusion of the abolition work as the
ultimate freedom that he desired, Black also suffers from the
shortsightedness that despite his solution being implicit in the
experience of humanity, he lacks the foundations of what a world without
work would actually look like. He is right in his assertion that the
very action of play would provide the basis for this world without work,
however the solution, one could argue is that play itself must be
revolutionized as a form of rebellion. For, is there nothing more
revelatory than experiencing an event for the sake of ‘being-there’, as
Heidegger would suggest?
Again, this is not a new idea. In fact, the idea that play or leisure
can be used as a means of liberation has existed perhaps as long as
human civilization. The Egyptians developed, in the year 3100 BC, the
game Senet. Played on a game board reminiscent of checkers, it was
designed to represent the Ancient Egyptian religious myth of the soul’s
journey to the afterlife. Games are played not so much as a diversion,
as commonly believed, but are rather a sort of narratological
apotheosis, allowing an individual to temporarily displace themselves
physically; psychically, temporally and spiritually from their regular
day to day experience. In effect, play constitutes a sort of structured
form of taoist meditation. Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle,
reinforces this understanding of leisure:
“Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a
pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation.”
In essence, consciousness itself is a “game”. We are constantly
suspended within a cognitive game with ourselves. This is where a
society founded on play could elevate the intrinsic realities about our
own nature to the forefront of community. Debord speaks about how the
images of spectacle themselves constitute an “instrument of collective
unification”. He cautions however, that the freedom of libidinal
spectacle can also lead to the capture of this spirit by those wishing
to use it as a form of social coercion and control. This is why, more
than ever it is imperative that we must play rather than spectate. Play
implies interaction and involvement, whereas spectacle is restrained
itself to a form of passivity, thus restraining human ability to the
level of lethargic consumer rather than the possibility of creativity.
Debord was aware that passive spectacle is the mediator of human social
relations in our current era, if we view social interaction and a life
of play as a form of protest against passivity, we can further
understand the ways in which this revelation of play as rebellion has
been purposefully suppressed by those who seek to relegate the masses to
producers and consumers of fiscal profiteering.
“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical
project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the
categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread
of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The
spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The
concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative
universe.”