<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">Hi</SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Courier; min-height: 16px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">I've been following the Ludocapitalism debate and wanted to briefly convey my imressions.</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Courier; min-height: 16px; "><BR></DIV><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision, Gilles Deleuze,</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><I> Postscript on the Societies of Contro</I></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">l.</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"> </SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="4"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">Deleuze's assertion that for many immaterial workers, work is already play, playing the mertiocracy game, playing at office politics, acquiring more or less explicit (and sometime quantifiable) expressions of esteem from colleagues, playing the publishing game if you are and academic etc. This assertion i th</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">ink casts some new light on Keith Hart's splendid point in stressing the importance of the nature of the game.It would seem that the reintegration of ludic element in capitalism that has occurred in the post-war years has much to do with with change of forms of power. Discipline transforms (for some people in some places) into control and</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">'ruling through freedom' (Nicolas Rose). The way to do this is to construct an artificial envrionment (a game) in which freedom and passions are put to work. Brands are a good example of that. In some places they have managed to almost totally reconstruct the rules of ordinary sociality (I'm just back form Shanghai, teaching brand-crazy students) transforming the free flow of sociality and passions into productive labour that is directly connected to financial markets. Corporate culture, coaching, NLP, are other forms for the exercise of power through the construction of subjectivity and the erection of an 'everyday game'. (Coaching artists into successful players in the 'experience economy', is, as one of my recent interviewees put it' about teaching them to see themselves as commodities.)</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px; font: 13.0px Courier; min-height: 16.0px"><BR></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">The erection of such a capitalist game long predates Second Life. I would date it to the post-war years. Key influences I think are the New Age movement and its influence on management beginning in the 1970s (motivational seminars, the corporate survival weekend), and, predating that, the growing interest in the subjectivity of workers and consumers that emerges out of the Industrial Relations movement, Maslow's enormously influential work and, on the consumer side, Motivation Research. What happens here is that management begins to take a direct interest in suubjectivity as an underlying factor that shapes the relations between workers and the company, or between consumers and goods (some key works: Ernest Dicter, The Strategy of Desire, Dough McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, both published in 1960). Instead of trying to impose such relations from above, one now tries to alter (program) the conditions of subjectivity from which they emerge, change the rules of the game.</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Courier; min-height: 16px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">What is put to work here? What is the essence of the game, if such a concept is possible? I think Rifkin is right when he connects what he calls Deep Play to 'the creation of deep bonds of participation'. After all (pace World of Warcraft) this is the way play, the ludic of effervescence has been thought by the likes of Durkheim and Huizinga. Play is about the ethical element to human interaction. At least in the Aristotelian sense of ethics as 'that which has to do with custom or character (ethos)'- the construction of social relations among free men. And for Aristotle ethics was about play (in the modern sense of that term), work belong to the a-ethical sphere of the oikos where there was no room for freedom. So is the turn to play as a managerial strategy a reaction to the increasing (potential) autonomy and freedom of today's productive forces, their leaving the modern oikos of the factory (where Hannah Arendt saw them) and becoming public? This would be manifested in fact that a growing amount of wealth is not produced by commanded and un-free labour, but by a socialized general intellect (or mass intellectuality) that is impossible to command. (You cannot order someone to be creative or cool.) Instead, power is exercised by creating the game, by imposing an ethic?</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </SPAN></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Courier" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></SPAN></FONT></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>Adam Arvidsson</DIV><DIV>Associate Professor, Media Studies</DIV><DIV>Department of Media, Cognition and Communication</DIV><DIV>University of Copenhagen</DIV><DIV>Njalsgade 80</DIV><DIV>2300 Copenhagen S</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>check out what I'm doing at</DIV><DIV><A href="http://web.mac.com/adamerica/iWeb/AdamArvidsson/Intro.html">http://web.mac.com/adamerica/iWeb/AdamArvidsson/Intro.html</A></DIV><DIV>rate me at:</DIV><DIV><A href="http://www.actics.com/my/profile?index=1">http://www.actics.com/my/profile?index=1</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>tel<SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; 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"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN>+46 702416473</DIV><DIV>Skype-ID adamerica70</DIV><DIV>Blog: <A href="http://blog.actics.com">http://blog.actics.com</A></DIV><DIV>www.media.ku.dk</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></SPAN></SPAN><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>