Work, play and boredom - Ephemera

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ephemera 11(4): 495-500 The playing fields of late capitalism reviews Peter Fleming as they were in Weber or Marx’s time. Again this is why the computation of fun represented by Howie the Quality Cat was merely a prelude for some proper play. The fooling around by these workers certainly may have had an unintended effect of inadvertently reinforcing broader class relations (see Burawoy, 1979) but in and of itself still represented a moment of non-work: time wasting, anti-management jokes and various forms of sabotage. On this count, we might do well to reread Ross’ (1988) learned analysis of the Paris Commune and its vertiginous codification in the drunken poetry of Rimbaud (as the child-poet avers to his fellow workers in ‘Blankets of Blood’: It’s our turn! Romantic friends. The fun begins/O Waves of fire, we’ll never work again!). The abolition of these authoritarian structures and the surplus scarcity that maintained them was a joyous and playful moment. Not because it was intentionally designed to be such but because it released the worker from his or her identity, from the imprisoning idiom of the métier. And in a society structured by the ideology of work, this identity includes everyone as Rimbaud’s lyrical scorn attests (bosses and workers/all of them peasants, and common). Self-management and a driving counterwork imaginary transformed the social into living labour, freeing it from the tyranny of compartmentalized roles that had little to do with being human. This event transmuted work into a living activity again, replete with moments of initiative, play and serious non-coercive problem solving (of which the weak and disingenuous simulacra we might find in a HSBC or Google training game). Ross (1988) even suggests that the Commune reactivated a counter-modulation of pleasure and playfulness that was strictly forgetful of work as defined by fathers, teachers, priests and the Gates Corporation. Importantly, this did not mean that things didn’t get done or children went hungry as if the communards were blissfully high on a utopian dream. Indeed, participative mutual aid, co-operation and democratic multi-tasking abound. For it was only after a prolonged, nasty dirty war that this zone of imperceptible sociality came to be termed idleness. Here, on the contrary, ‘by a striking paradox, laziness, remained outside the work order, but moved fast, too fast’ (Ross, 1988: 53). Of course, none of this is to romanticize the commune or any other instance of democratic self-management (although I see nothing wrong with that per se). It simply intends to argue that when games, play and fun appear as isolated concepts in a discourse of power they cease to have meaning. Or, more accurately, they ought to ceases to have meaning. Why? Well, not dissimilar to the reified notion of work, when they are practiced in a democratic milieu of self-management, outside of bosses, deadlines and directives, they are everything and nothing: Play and work collapse into themselves for they are not separate from the world as such, especially once the cultural logic of the ‘boss function’ disappears. In the meantime, the salience of play and games in the realm of contemporary work organizations indicates something is still very wrong. That this suggestion is not raised to the level of a political question only compounds the worry. ‘Let’s play!’ Well, no let’s not, at least not in the manner suggested by an unimaginative consultant. Andersen’s book offers an extensive and thorough overview of the way in which games and play has evolved and been represented in the business literature. The book has made this reader think about the relationship between play and work in a more serious manner. While play and games are certainly ambivalent figures within the run-away train that we call the ‘modern economy’, I have been invited to reflect on what it might 499
eferences the author ephemera 11(4): 495-500 The playing fields of late capitalism reviews Peter Fleming mean to rediscover the happiness of play, a happiness that perhaps lies beyond capital and labour. Berardi, B.F. (2009) The soul at work: From alienation to autonomy. Semiotext(e): Los Angeles. Burawoy, M. (1979) Manufacturing consent: The labor process under monopoly capitalism. University of Chicago Press. Chicago. Collinson, D. (1992) Managing the shopfloor: Subjectivity, masculinity and workplace culture. Walter de Gruyter. Hamper, B. (1992) Rivethead: Tales from the assembly line. Warner Books, New York. Marcuse, H. (1955) Eros and civilization. Beacon: Boston. Ross, A. (2004) No collar: The humane workplace and its hidden costs. Temple University Press: Philadelphia. Ross, K. (1988) The Emergence of social space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Verso: London. Peter Fleming is Professor of Work and Organization at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary College. He is the author of several books including Contesting the corporation (2007 Cambridge University Press, with André Spicer), Authenticity and the cultural politics of work (2009 Oxford University Press), The end of corporate social responsibility (forthcoming, Sage, with Marc T. Jones) and The common and the corporation (forthcoming, Routledge). E-mail: p.fleming@qmul.ac.uk 500
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