[iDC] some remarks on ludocapitalism

[Adam Arvidsson]

Hi

I've been following the Ludocapitalism debate and wanted to briefly  
convey my imressions.

If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's  
because they express the corporate situation with great precision,  
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control.

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 think 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  '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.)



  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.


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?


Adam Arvidsson
Associate Professor, Media Studies
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication
University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 80
2300 Copenhagen S

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