Radical Animal Play: Understanding Human Nature Through Play

Radical Animal:
play, ecology,
human nature/
Pat Kane

www.radicalanimal.net
@radicalanimals
QuaysCultureEvent, 25/10/13
Saturday, 26 October 13

In honour of Tony Wilson, 20 February 1950 – 10 August 2007

“The Hacienda
must be
built” (again &
again & again...)

SPOT THE HANDHELD, NETWORKED, VIRTUALISING PORTAL...


SPOT THE HANDHELD, NETWORKED, VIRTUALISING PORTAL....


JOY OF PLAY * JOY OF MAKING/CRAFT/POIESIS
JOY OF SELF-MASTERY * JOY OF SOCIABILITY


...& The RUIN OF PLAY
According to a recent Greenpeacer
eport, Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and
its Contribution to Climate Change, the
electricity consumed by cloud computing
globally will increase from 632 billion kilowatt
hours in 2007 to 1,963 billion kWh by 2020 and
the associated CO2 equivalent emissions
would reach 1,034 megatonnes.
Guardian, 2010
During the last 15 years the civil war conflict in Congo has
cost the lives of more than 5 million people and 300.000
women have been raped. The war will continue as long as
armed groups can finance their warfare by selling
minerals to companies supplying mobile phone
manufacturers. http://www.bloodinthemobile.org


Thou art the thing
itself...Unaccommodated
man is no more but such a
poor, bare, forked animal
as thou art
KING LEAR

But is “accommodated” man
just a joy junkie, all-too-easily
seduced by his neuronal
appetites for pleasure and
absorption
absorbtion – lost in “playbour”
and status consumption?

Yet Edgar points to the radical
animal...
EDGAR: [Aside] And worse I
may be yet: the worst is not
/So long as we can say 'This
is the worst”.

We have no choice other than
to deal with the “unnatural
nature of being human”, our
infinity of semiotic, abstracting
and conceptual possibilities,
within a materially and
ecologically finite world...
But how?

How can a RADICAL ANIMAL live sustainably
on a FINITE PLANET? The illimitable live within limits?
1. UNDERSTAND THE SOCIO-BIOLOGY OF PLAY
AND INNOVATION PROPERLY
2. LEARN FROM THE WEB, AS A HOMOLOGY OF
OUR NATURAL CONDITIONS OF PLAY AND
INNOVATION – A 'GROUND OF PLAY'
3. CONSIDER AS A POSSIBILITY THE
“PLANETARY BOUNDARIES” APPROACH AS THE
NEW “RULES OF OUR PLAYGROUND”
4. EVOLVE A “PLAY ETHIC” THAT FOREGROUNDS
PASSIONATE MAKING, DIVERSE CRAFTING,
SOCIAL CO-PRODUCTION

Brian Sutton-Smith, in his 1997 masterwork The Ambiguity of Play.
A non-reductive socio-biological definition of play as "adaptive
potentiation".
…. all those experiments, simulations and virtualisations – games,
jokes, stories, constructions - that we recognise as play, but which
clearly serve an evolutionary purpose: namely, to aid our complex
mammalian flourishing.
Play is "the stylized performance of existential themes that mimic or
mock the uncertainties and risks of survival and, in so doing, engage
the propensities of mind, body and cells in exciting forms of
arousal” (S-S)
We establish zones where we take reality lightly, and joyfully: and we do
so in order to master the tensions and challenges of sociable living with
other complex, communicating and interiorised human beings.


1. UNDERSTAND THE SOCIO-BIOLOGY OF PLAY AND
INNOVATION PROPERLY
NEOTENY
“Neoteny is the evolutionary biological principle that
the infant features of a species can evidence themselves
in the adults of their descendants” (www.neoteny.org)

Let’s compare Italian
autonomist-Marxist
Paulo Virno on Neoteny
…and educational
psychologist BrianSutton-Smith…


1. UNDERSTAND THE SOCIO-BIOLOGY OF PLAY AND
INNOVATION PROPERLY
Paulo Virno on neoteny
'Natural-Historical Diagrams: the 'New Global' Movement and the Biological Invariant", in
The Italian Difference, edited by Alberto Toscano, Re-Press, 2009. http://3.ly/virno

The human animal is the potential animal - we are in an "unfinished
state". Four causes…
a) the language faculty leading to…
b) our instinctual non-specialization - makes us polyvalent, generalised,
obsessive learners
c) Neoteny - “a chronic infancy is matched by a chronic non-adaptation, to be
mitigated in each case by social and cultural devices” (Virno)
d) We don’t ‘fit’ into an ‘environment’, we ‘make’ our ‘worlds’ - “We
wrestle with a vital context that is always partially undetermined, a world in
which a stream of perceptual stimuli is difficult to translate into an effective
operational code” (Virno)


VIRNO’s Adorno-esque conclusions, in the age of
post-Fordism
Our instinctual non-specialisation? Means we’re
ideal flexible labourers - all that matters is the
“habit not to have habits, to react promptly to the
unusual”
That we fluidly make our worlds, rather than
live in our environmental niches ? That serves
the "permanent precarity of jobs”, nomadic
in the transnational labour market
Our neotenic forever-youngness, always ready to
learn and adapt? Means we are now subject to
"permanent formation… what matters is not what
is progressively learning (roles, techniques, etc)
but the display of the pure power to learn".


“we’re all doomed,
Captain Mannering!”
…yes, if Virno is right
about the ease by
which our “mannering”
may be “captained”….

Neoteny in Sutton-Smith is much more optimistic
- One evolutionary function of play is the continuation of "neonatal
optimism" throughout the life-span.
- The "unrealistic optimism, egocentricity and reactivity" of the growing child,
all of them "guarantors of persistence in the face of adversity",
characterise many of our adult play behaviours.
- Play brings a sense of joyful indefatigability and energetic resilience, which
– like the pleasure of sex for procreation – is evolution's "salute" to the
human animal for maintaining a "general liveliness", in the face of the
challenges of existence


Virno is inconsistent on the role of neotenic play in our
species being…
Multitude: between innovation and negation (2008)
Says that language defies
our empathic ‘mirrorneurons’ the Nazi saying to the
prisoner, ‘This is not a man’.
The joke says, ‘this is not
not a man’ - it negates the
negation, puts us in a space
of sheer possibility, from
which ‘innovative political
action’ may occur

Jimmy Carr’s ‘amputee
Soldiers and British
Paralympic team’ joke…

1. UNDERSTAND THE SOCIO-BIOLOGY OF PLAY AND INNOVATION PROPERLY

But how can playful
potentiation, all that
neotenic openness,
do both things - be an everyday
linguistic reservoir
for political
innovation?
- but also trap us in a velvet cage of cliché and compulsive
behaviour? [Compared 2 the Situationists, critical theory’s in a
mess with play…]
Intellectually, we need to keep our vista on play’s effectivity in
the world as broad as possible - Sutton-Smith suggests seven
“rhetorics of play”, stretching from modern to ancient,
autonomous to heteronomous… but there may be many
others…

2. LEARN FROM THE WEB, AS A NATURAL 'GROUND
OF PLAY'
Can I? Is it possible?
I want to articulate the Net as a
tool to serve the expression of
human neoteny, a medium for
life-long & generic faculties of
potentiation
…without falling into the
idealism of noopolitics or
cybernetics…
… or falling foul of a critique of
digital innovation and
playfulness which links it
directly to capital
accumulation and the subtlest
of social repressions


Only one idea I have…
The ‘ground of play’
links the constitutive and the
constitutional

2. LEARN FROM THE WEB, AS A NATURAL
'GROUND OF PLAY'
The ‘ground of play’ links the
constitutive and the
constitutional (and may be the
deep species-being foundation of
the internet (why it is “so
amazing” (S.Cupitt))

If our degree of neoteny and
potentiation is what makes us
human…
… then does the internet serve as a
continuation & elaboration of those
supportive early conditions of
developmental play? Both
‘constitutively’ and
‘constitutionally’?

'GROUND OF PLAY'
A complex-mammalian ‘ground of play’--1) Is loosely but robustly
governed
2) Ensures a surplus of time,
space and materials
3) Is a zone where failure, risk
and mess is treated as
necessary for
development.

Play, in terms of ethology, presumes a degree of
developmentally-oriented governance or structural
support!

'GROUND OF PLAY'
So the 'constitutive' power of play in humanity – that neotenydriven potentiation that excites both autonomists and sociobiologists…
… seems to also require a 'constitutional' dimension: a protocol
of governance securing certain material and emotional conditions,
to enable a rich plurality of playforms.
We constitute ourselves through play - but we are constituted
by the ‘ground of play’ also


3: CAN WE PLAY WITH / WITHIN THE NATURAL
BOUNDARIES OF THE PLANET?
PLAY-ETHICS IN A WORLD OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS ARE NOT
EASY.... TAKE STUART BRAND
IN 60'S/70's BRAND EASILY
FUSED DEVELOPMENTAL,

....WITH TECHNOLOGICAL,

(MERRY PRANKSTERS, NEW
GAMES MOVEMENT,
COMMUNAL LIVING)...

ARCHITECTURE/URBANISM, ALT.
ENERGY, BUSINESS
CONSULTANCY)

HEALTHY, NATURAL PLAY

ABSTRACT, UNNATURAL
PLAY (COMPUTERS & NETS,

LSD?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTAuLsJDyWI


STUART BRAND
1968 WHOLE EARTH
CATALOG: “WE ARE AS
GODS AND WE MIGHT AS
WELL GET GOOD AT IT”
(DIY, SMALL-IS-BEAUTIFUL,
SOFT TECHNOLOGY)

NATURAL AND UNNATURAL PLAY
COME
TOGETHER IN ONE SLOGAN...

2009 WHOLE EARTH
DISCIPLINE: “WE ARE
AS GODS AND WE
MUST GET GOOD AT IT”
(NUCLEAR POWER,
GENE-TECH, TERRAFORMING)
IS HE NOW RIGHT? WRONG?
BUT RECONCILING NATURAL AND UNNATURAL PLAY OF HUMANITY
IS VERY DIFFICULT...


'Human activities increasingly dominate 9 crucial planetary systems. Add to the familiar
ones---climate, biodiversity, and chemical pollution---atmospheric aerosols, ocean
acidification, excess nitrogen in agriculture, too much land in agriculture,
freshwater scarcity, and ozone depletion. To have "a safe operating space for
humanity" on Earth requires adjusting our behavior to work within those systems. How
we collectively step up to that responsibility will determine whether "the
Anthropocene" (the current geological era shaped by humans) will be a tragedy or
humanity's greatest accomplishment.”

… BUT LYNAS' INNOVATION PLAYGROUND IS SECURED BY PRO-NUKES,
PRO-GEO-ENGINEERING, PRO-”PROSPERITY”-AS-MATERIALACCUMULATION
HEROIC, “RATIONALIST”, INDIVIDUALIST, GREEN-BAITING DISCOURSE


BELIEVES THAT WITH OUR WEB
AND “NOOSPHERE” OF
INFORMATION-PLUS-COMMUNITYPARTICIPATION, WE HAVE THE
POSSIBILITY OF “GIVING GAIA ITS
MOMENT OF META-AWARE SELFCONSCIOUSNESS” - OF BEING
GAIAS BRAIN...
BUT FLANNERY IS POSTINDIVIDUALIST – WE ARE “GREEDY
APES”, TOO WEAK TO BE HUNTERGATHERERS, NEEDING OUR
SOCIAL CODES (AND DIVISIONS OF
LABOUR) TO GET ANYTHING
WORTHWHILE DONE – JUMPED-UP
SUPERORGANISMS WHO HAVE TO
ATTAIN A MODICUM OF PLANETARY
ETHICS...

4. EVOLVE A “PLAY ETHIC” THAT FOREGROUNDS
PASSIONATE MAKING, DIVERSE CRAFTING, SOCIAL COPRODUCTION

HOW TO FIND THE “GOOD PLAY” (LEG-GODT/LEGO)
MAKE OUR RESPONSE TO
CLIMATE CHANGE AS
INNOVATIVE & FUN AS
MASTERING THE WORLD
THROUGH PLAY IS FOR
ETHAN
- OCCUPY (VIA ADBUSTERS)
- ROB HOPKINS ON FESTIVITY/
CARNIVAL AND “TRANSITION
TOWNS”
- FUTUREFEST.ORG
- JULIET SCHOR’S PLENITUDE


SCIENCE FICTION ECO-IMAGINEERS
CORY DOCTOROW

LOCAL FABRICATION,
REPAIR, REUSE AND
INGENUITY AS LIBERATION
TOOLS FOR
MARGINALISED
COMMUNITIES

CAMERON'S AVATAR

BOMBASTIC, MILITARISTIC, SIMPLISTIC...
BUT AN AUTHENTIC YEARNING TO LINK
TOGETHER NETWORK/DIGITAL SOCIETY
AND ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS?
HOW TO “GET GOOD AT PLAYING GOD”
WITH OUR OWN BODIES & NATURE?


LIVING FOR THE CITY

The egalitarian aspects of city life
consistently provide the best sociological
& physical supports for resource
conservation and carbon mitigation...
Most contemporary cities, in rich
countries or poor, repress the potential
environmental efficiencies inherent in
human-settlement density. The
ecological genius of the city remains
a vast, largely hidden power...
There is no planetary shortage of
“carrying capacity” if we are willing to
make democratic public space, rather
than modular, private consumption, the
engine of sustainable equality...

HIDE & SEEK WEEKENDER, SOUTHBANK, LONDON

URBAN PLAY HELPS CITIZENS
RECLAIM THEIR CITIES EMOTIONALLY
– AND THUS RAISES EXPECTATIONS
FOR MORE DEMOCRATIC &
SUSTAINABLE PLANNING?

Public affluence – represented by great
urban parks, free museums, libraries
and infinite possibilities for human
interaction – represents an alternative
route to a rich standard of life based
on Earth-friendly sociality.
Mike Davis, 'Building The Ark', NLR 61

HOW TO FIND THE “GOOD PLAY” (LEG GODT/LEGO)

ANTHONY GIDDENS

… SAYS ARE
REFLEXIVE SELVES –
META-AWARE OF OUR
CONDITIONS – ALWAYS
SEEING THINGS 'IN
PLAY'....


“There can be no question
of a “return to nature” as
the guiding thread of
environmental politics. We
live in a world that in
many respects is “on
the other side of
nature”—where human
intervention into what
was the natural world is
so profound that there
can be no way back. The
political and philosophical
implications of the retreat
of nature are very
considerable.”

“It is unlikely that
the public can be
persuaded to put
their weight behind
climate change
policy if it is based
wholly upon
negatives—ie upon
avoidance of
abstract future
dangers. Can we
develop a more
positive set of
values around
environmental
ends?”

HOW TO FIND THE “GOOD PLAY” (LEG GODT/LEGO)

The confident, sustainable state
“The trouble with socialism is that it takes too
many evenings” (Oscar Wilde)
...so let’s take (or better, let’s regulate for) more
afternoons! Killer combo of coming radical automation/

computation AND need to de-intensify
consumption...
Skidelsky, Schor, Jackson, and NEF say we
need collective labour-market regs, to achieve
wellbeing/ post-consumerist outcomes.

New Economics
Foundation

Old 3rdWay axiom: we need to find a way to
balance “economic dynamism & social
cohesion”
4thWay? we need to find a way to balance
“economic cohesion & social dynamism” - not
just wellbeing, but well-becoming...

HOW TO FIND THE “GOOD PLAY” (LEG
GODT/LEGO)
JOHN MUIR: A PASSION FOR
NATURE DONALD WORSTER

Got lost in nature, a biophiliac but was ALSO a great inventor/
tinkerer/engineer

“Scots are Salt of the
earth AND of Machines”
MICHEL BAUWENS, FOUNDATION FOR P2P
ALTERNATIVES

“We regard what is truly scarce as
plentiful [Nature]
And what is truly plentiful as scarce
[Information]”

Radical Animal:
play, ecology,
human nature/
Pat Kane

www.radicalanimal.net
TWT: @radicalanimals
email:playethical@gmail.com
QuaysCultureEvent, 25/10/13

Radical Animal Play: Understanding Human Nature Through Play

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Radical Animal Play: Understanding Human Nature Through Play