But it is the anti-capitalist and anti-regulative impulse of worker initiated games, play and fun that I think is interesting. This is not simply because of my own particular views, but also because it does go to the heart of the political permutations that are taking place in the world of work and beyond today. The importance of play and frivolity has been explored a great deal in the critical literature given its juxtaposition with economic rationality (see Marcuse [1955], for example, for a wonderful investigation whose erudition is only matched by ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s [2009] recent contribution). Moments of fun might be found within the broader context of work, but the basic axiomatic principles of capitalist rationality are still as anathema to play today as they were in Weber or Marx’s time. Again this is why the computation of fun represented by Howie the Quality Cat was merely a prelude for some proper play. The fooling around by these workers certainly may have had an unintended effect of inadvertently reinforcing broader class relations (see Burawoy, 1979) but in and of itself still represented a moment of non-work: time wasting, anti-management jokes and various forms of sabotage. On this count, we might do well to reread Ross’ (1988) learned analysis of the Paris Commune and its vertiginous codification in the drunken poetry of Rimbaud (as the child-poet avers to his fellow workers in ‘Blankets of Blood’: It’s our turn! Romantic friends. The fun begins/O Waves of fire, we’ll never work again!). The abolition of these authoritarian structures and the surplus scarcity that maintained them was a joyous and playful moment. Not because it was intentionally designed to be such but because it released the worker from his or her identity, from the imprisoning idiom of the métier. And in a society structured by the ideology of work, this identity includes everyone as Rimbaud’s lyrical scorn attests (bosses and workers/all of them peasants, and common). Self-management and a driving counterwork imaginary transformed the social into living labour, freeing it from the tyranny of compartmentalized roles that had little to do with being human. This event transmuted work into a living activity again, replete with moments of initiative, play and serious non-coercive problem solving (of which the weak and disingenuous simulacra we might find in a HSBC or Google training game). Ross (1988) even suggests that the Commune reactivated a counter-modulation of pleasure and playfulness that was strictly forgetful of work as defined by fathers, teachers, priests and the Gates Corporation. Importantly, this did not mean that things didn’t get done or children went hungry as if the communards were blissfully high on a utopian dream. Indeed, participative mutual aid, co-operation and democratic multi-tasking abound. For it was only after a prolonged, nasty dirty war that this zone of imperceptible sociality came to be termed idleness. Here, on the contrary, ‘by a striking paradox, laziness, remained outside the work order, but moved fast, too fast’ (Ross, 1988: 53).
The Playing Fields of Late Capitalism, a review of Power At Play: The Relationships Between Play, Work and Governance
Fantastic piece, and something that dives into the importance of thinking about what play means for leftist utopianism and praxis, which has been on my mind for a while. I agree that we seriously need to think about the possibilities of undirected, free form, organic play outside of hierarchies of institutional power and avoid the trap of exploitationware.