Hi everyone, welcome to another entry of our Short Attention Span Reading Group. This text is coming out of left-field a bit, and is meant to provide a different flavour from the other great texts in the series so far; it's one of my absolute favourites :)
The Text
David Graeber, What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
This is a fun little meditation that dips into really high-level concepts like ontology/epistemology, philosophy of mind, rationalism, and political economy all while touching-base with a very intimate, grounded, embodied investigation on being alive, on being a human animal. It asks such Important Questions as, ‘why is sex fun?’
David Graeber is an anthropologist and an anarchist. Known for works like Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and Bullshits Jobs, his writing specializes in re-enchanting the mundane and applying high-level marxist thought to daily lived experiences.
This text examines capitalist cultural assumptions about the point of living, which colour our understandings of the whole animal kingdom, including ourselves. And it looks at historical challenges to this set of assumptions, from Kropotkin onward. This text is an examination of Panpsychism, the philosophical school of materialist thought arguing that mind/consciousness pervades the universe. Oh ya, and it dunks on the original lobster boy.
This text asks The Big Question: what is the point of life, the universe, and everything?
Is it... play? Do atoms play?
How would we know? And why might we recoil at the idea? And why do we discount the possibility?
I like this text because, to quote it, “it gives us ground to unthink the world around us.” Have fun with it, and share your thoughts and feelings :)
“I’m not even saying that the position I’m suggesting here—that there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality—is necessarily true. I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere.”
yeah it was interesting.
I've never read Graeber before, my immediate thought after reading it was; anarchists are great when you want someone to elegantly & entertainingly deconstruct orthodoxies & point out the absurdities/contradictions in the systems & schemas we design.... but ask them for a solution, "what's the point of it all then?", and the reply is more or less useless: "oh it's just all here to muck about with".
it's a good experiment though to come up with alternate governing principles, I wonder what made him arrive at play as opposed to for example, conflict, or experimentation (i guess guided/purposeful play is experementation?) or struggle or communication or something else?
is it because as an academic philosopher he's got the crucial resource that allows play - i.e. leisure time and the money & people to mess about with?
i liked the article, but not the "play principle" idea, I don't even know how you derive ethics from such a principle for example.
I do like pansychism approaches though, I'm a big fan.
And on animals behaving like animals, I read an account a while ago I can't remember where from a researcher who said they got shown around an octopus' cave, like it grabbed their hand & gave them a guided tour... I don't think that's play but maybe the underlying point of existence is to be house-proud :D
Anarchists, I find, are great at ethics and philosophy. Like, they’re always the cutting edge of ethical developments around things like class, race, gender, ability, colonization, imperalism, etc. And they always have, honestly, really great visions around alternatives to that
Probably where anarchists most stereotypically fall short is in thinking about ‘how do we get there’ which, of course, in the context of modern america, is definitely something all tendencies fall prey to.
I like Graeber’s supposition that the point is play, though I agree with what he said in the article, that he’s not necessarily certain play is at the heart of it, but that it’s just as likely, and probably more likely, than our culturally engrained values/beliefs of competition.
I think the basic argument was that, at rest, when not hungry, horny, cold, whatever; when we are at our most free of need, we play. So there’s an argument to be made that that’s the default... drive? of things!
And a potential ethical fall-out of this could be... maximize time for play! Orient the focus of our lives away from things that feel like work, toward things that feel like play. ‘The point of life is play’ could have cultural impacts, I think. I agree, it’s not the most well-developed idea hahaha
I could see major fallout in various academic disciplines tho, from biology to scoiology to economics, etc. But... ya! More just something fun to think about, maybe
ANYWAY! I agree, I love panpsychism. It, honestly, just makes sense to me.
That thing about the octopus is so wonderfully adorable. Like, I love that so much and I want a octopus to just get all excited to show me something and drag me there by the hand hahahahaha dawwwww.
(also I love your username. I just harvested some last week and i’m excited to see where they take me)
"...that he’s not necessarily certain play is at the heart of it, but that it’s just as likely, and probably more likely, than our culturally engrained values/beliefs of competition."
Yeah I sort of read that as a playful dig at Dawkins' claim that "it's all just a metaphor i didn't really mean any of the words i used", so I wasn't really sure how serious he was about his play theory. which i think is why i don't like the supposition actually, and i think it's interesting that you wrote "recoil" in your OP, cos I sort of do have that response.
for me, in my experience, life is serious not playful, although it can be. I'm reluctant to ignore my senses & memories & intuitions and they generally inform me that existence is pretty serious business. ofc I can be decieved/wrong but...
"I think the basic argument was that, at rest, when not hungry, horny, cold, whatever; when we are at our most free of need, we play. So there’s an argument to be made that that’s the default… drive? of things!"
so to this I'd say, we also play when we need things too. We can defer basic needs, and children for example often will (at least past a certain age, in some contexts) rather play outside and have to be called in to eat. And also, we often involve play in the meeting of our basic needs (tho not always). And, when people are fighting infection, or depressed, or otherwise distressed, the desire to play i think goes fast. if it were a default, i think it wouldn't be so conditional and contextual. and sometimes we stop playing and just lay about in the sun.
personally, while i do think there is a drive to play, I concieve of it as a strategy that life adopts in order to learn stuff. Its like running a simulation - a game is a set of rules you (and others) impose on an activity. you can cheat, you can change the rules etc - this happens organically. the point is to come up with a set of rules, because the external world (and you) abides by sets of rules (that can vary, or be contextual, or change, just like rules in games). and a way of learning how to best adapt to and utilise those real rules for real material reward, is to experiment with artificial rules that you generate.
for example, with play fighting - it lets animals learn to fight within rules designed essentially for learning a dangerous (serious) real world activity safely.
i guess I'm trying to say i think play is a tool/strategy for learning, and learning is maybe a more "default" thing than play because it's how we adapt to our environment.
"And a potential ethical fall-out of this could be… maximize time for play! Orient the focus of our lives away from things that feel like work, toward things that feel like play."
so then I get to the ethics, and I think that there's a reason why we have this orthodox division of concepts between games and reality.
i think we're taught pretty severely via our senses, and our affective (i mean "felt") responses to our senses & memories, that life is serious business. Since we use games to learn, and learning relies heavily on our "felt responses" to things (in play or otherwise), it can be tempting to mix the two and conclude that play is as meaningful as "real life".
life requires work often. in the example of the cat toying with it's prey, the cat is learning through play (i may be wrong here but they play with their prey when they know it can't get away, not when they're hunting it down) and the mouse is working to survive, by applying stuff it's learnt - some of which will have been learnt via play activities.
if you take an ethical approach that play should be maximised, I worry (given my conception of what play consists of) that there is nothing to cause you to live as if life is a serious thing. And I think that life would continue to teach you, even if you attempted to play all the time, that there are serious consequences for your actions, because unless you don't feel things you will hurt people and be upset (or attacked possibly), or hurt yourself & instinctively stop playing with the hot fire, for example.
like where is the reason not to be whimsical and cruel like the cat, if you have the power to do so? And if you arrange your life in the pursuit of play such that there are no "serious" consequences for yourself, i believe you would stop learning much because you would not be applying what you learn through playing to the world in order to survive. I think the reason people start viewing life as a game, or aspects of it (such as politics, for liberals), is because they have stopped needing to take it so seriously. And this I think can be seen in the difference between anybody who has experienced a real event compared to a simulated one, when you have to take life seriously sometimes (work), you end up better adapted for when life gets serious, and when life is serious you learn better in some ways than through play as the felt response to an experience will be much more.
So I guess this is why i "recoil" from the supposition, i don't view play as anything more than a strategy for learning, and i don't think it's the only or necessarily even always the best way to learn things. And I don't think you can stop somebody from playfully cutting up your grandma & stitching her face onto your dog if we suppose that all we should do is engage our impulse to play/experiment/have fun/exercise our powers.
sorry the above may not be particularly coherant, I'm not sure about my position anyway I may be completely wrong about play, or misconceiving what he means by it.
"I just harvested some last week and i’m excited to see where they take me)"
Enjoy! I love them so much, they really show you how your mind works I think. like finding out, oh my brain does have some fundamental sensory concept of time and space i know this now because i've seen what life looks like when I fuck with it. and shows you how resilient your concepts are, like of self or things, given that using shrooms to completely shatter them apart is temporary & you wake up the next day with your brain going "oh well that period of intense confusion & signal disruption/distortion is over, back to doing what i did before that all happened".
I mostly agree, I find the lack of proper takeaway a bit disappointing in an otherwise very pleasant article. I am not sure I see a direct consequences that can help us, you know, change the world. It can probably be used as one more justification of veganism?