[iDC] Michael Jackson and the death of macrofame

Fri Jun 26 15:15:07 UTC 2009

Is this an inappropriate response of a lurker who enjoys the  
conversations but never finds the time herself to contribute? The  
thought crossed my mind. But here is my 'Twitter' comment on play- 
labour (The footnote alone exceeded Twitter - apology for the trim)

Go dance. Empty your mind. Read Schiller[1] on Play and Truth. Go dance.

[1] Friedrich Schiller: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen.  
Reclam Nr.8994 [2] 1977, 14. Brief

Best,

Mechthild Schmidt

------------------------------------------------

Mechthild Schmidt
Department coordinator, Clinical Associate Professor
Digital Communications and Media
McGhee Division, New York University
726 Broadway, #669
New York, NY 10003

mschmidt at nyu.edu

On Jun 26, 2009, at 7:55 AM, Christian Fuchs wrote:

> And how is this category of playbour or play-labour connected to  
> Michael
> Jackson? Was Michael Jackson a playbourer, a capitalist, an immaterial
> worker, or something else? If there is no theoretical way that  
> allows us
> to distinguish the class position of Michael Jackson from the class
> position of a precarious call center agent or a precarious
> singer/dancer/writer etc, and we consider them all as part of one
> "class" or describe them all with one category such as "playbour",  
> then
> such categories do not make sense because they too much intermingle
> different socio-economic life worlds. So what categories should we use
> for describing the political economy of Michael Jackson? Is playbour a
> sufficient category=
>
> Christian
>
> Julian Kücklich schrieb:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Trebor asked me to write "a succinct, one paragraph definition of
>> playbour." Okay, here goes:
>>
>> If we assume that play is distinct from "ordinary life" (Huizinga),
>> and that it constitutes an "occasion of pure waste" (Caillois), then
>> playbour is the re-entry of ordinary life into play, with a
>> concomitant valorization of play activities. Insofar as life  
>> (bios) is
>> always productive, and be it only in the sense that it produces  
>> waste,
>> the extraction of value from play can be seen as a form of waste
>> management; and insofar as play can be seen as a waste of time, the
>> logic of playbour demands that time be wasted efficiently. In this
>> sense we could also call playbour the Taylorization of leisure. Like
>> other forms of affective or immaterial labour, playbour is not
>> productive in the sense of resulting in a product, but it is the
>> process itself that generates value. The means of production are the
>> players themselves, but insofar as they only exist within play
>> environments by virtue of their representations, and their
>> representations are usually owned by the providers of these
>> environments, the players cannot be said to be fully in control of
>> these means. Playbour is suffused with an ideology of play, which
>> effectively masks labour as play, and disguises the process of
>> self-expropriation as self-expression. However, exploitation and
>> empowerment, subjectification and objectification, wastefulness and
>> efficiency coexist in the ambiguous "third space" of playbour, where
>> these binary oppositions break down, and thus open up new
>> possibilities of intersubjectification.
>>
>> Hmm, maybe not so succinct, but it'll have to do for now. I'll try to
>> condense it to 140 characters and tweet it later.
>>
>> Julian aka @cucchiaio
>>
>> 2009/6/25 Trebor Scholz <trebor at thing.net <mailto:trebor at thing.net>>
>>
>>     Hi Julian,
>>     Great, could you re-join the discussion with a succinct, one
>>     paragraph definition of playbour
>>     and a very short argumentation of why neither play nor labor
>>     easily fit the situation?
>>     Cheers,
>>     Trebor
>>
>>     ----
>>     Written tersely, typed imperfectly, and then sent from my phone
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>> ---
>>
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>
> -- 
> - - -
> Priv.-Doz. Dr. Christian Fuchs
> Unified Theory of Information Research Group
> University of Salzburg
> Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
> 5020 Salzburg
> Austria
> christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
> Phone +43 662 8044 4823
> http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at
> http;//www.uti.at
> Editor of
> tripleC - Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation | Open Access  
> Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
> http://www.triple-c.at
> Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the  
> Information Age. New York: Routledge.
> http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html
>
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