By Pat Kane
In my investigations into the sources for a possible ""play ethic", I've found a schema from the Pennsylvanian educational psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith to be outstandingly productive. The blurb from his 1997 book, The Ambiguity of Play, sets out clearly his relevance to a neurosocial agenda:
Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct "rhetorics"--the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the Imaginary, and the Self...This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for "natural" selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability.
I've discovered that the "seven rhetorics" are effective mapping tools for contemporary social complexity, in the affluent societies at least. Indeed, much of what we used to regard as productive "work" is now better understood within these rhetorics of play.
Certainly, the Modern discourses of play-as-progress (child education and nuturance), play-as-imagination (media, entertainment and interactivity), and play-as-selfhood (therapy, self-motivation, lifestyle mobility) capture much that we recognise in our everyday lives - as generally happy producers, consumers and pro-sumers. But it's the endurance of the darker, more Ancient discourses that fascinates me just as much - and which I think points to the deep location of play in our species-being, at the kind of adaptive level that Sutton-Smith refers to.
Play-as-power? Note the appearance of play and gaming metaphors in the average page of political and world reportage (it's a great exercise for a week's reading) . Play-as-communal identity? From Friends to football hooligans, Big Brother to Matrix heads, we are clearly playing our way to new notions of social cohesion, both positive and negative.
Play-as-sheer-subversion? Again, from Jackass and the Office (or Dilbert in the US) , to the goofy titles of computer viruses, the antic and satiric energies of play are always there to be tapped into, as a low-level form of resistance to the administered life. My favourite recent example of play-as-fate-and-chance comes from the pentitent mathematician John Allen Paulos, who describes his fall into "cognitive delusion" last year, as he chased his WorldCom stocks up and down the markets, with disastrous personal consequences.
As Gerda Smith notes, the risk player (whether a day-trader or a casino high-roller) is expressing a very ancient and transhistorical human belief: that the randomness of existence (our oldest angst) can be conquered. Paulos wryly recovers his mathematical rigour, and demonstrates through some simple proofs just how theological and spiritual this belief is.
Yet his fall proves, at the very least, that the "adaptive potentiation" (Sutton-Smith) of play - flexible, quirky and excessive - is no respecter of professional status. When we're "in play and at play", thank Proteus, the game is always on - and we can't always predict which form of play will emerge as our most effective mode of agency.
The question is: how do we become more capacious and tensile players, ready for this permanent openness and opportunity? What kind of mind could "live creatively" with the seven rhetorics, taking pleasure and productivity out of their affinities and disaffinities, ambiguities and paradoxes? Might well-fashioned "emoticeuticals" - built to enhance play's adaptive legacies in the brain - help us to get there? And now, we cut to a secret neuro-lab in Happy Valley...
All comments welcome.