Play Journal

Not well-being, but well-becoming

I've just posted to the Guardian's Comment Is Free blog again - this time, responding to their 'Politics of Wellbeing' debate. I've recently finished reading a beautiful excursus on Gilles Deleuze by Todd May: I was able to incorporate a lot of his points about the 'ontological creativity' evoked by Deleuze into the piece - it gave force to my critique of the well-being agenda as paternalist and overly-normative.

And it allowed me to coin the term 'well-becoming' as an alternative - which (now that I think about it) is actually not that far away from the 'pursuit of happiness', taking joy in the endless search for happiness, rather than the attainment or even management of it. (At some point, I'm going to sit down and properly engage with the relationship between Deleuze's ideas and the Play Ethic: something tells me they're very similarly founded, at base).

But my suspicions about the new consensus of values sought by the well-being advocates were raised by several degrees this morning, as I came across Prospect magazine's new survey of intellectuals, asking them what they think the great opposition of the current century will be (after the demise of right and left).

Play Ethic @ BBC 'Digital Futures'

Sorry for belated posting to all those involved, but here is my keynote presentation (in Powerpoint) to the BBC's third annual Digital Futures design conference,  It was a truly fascinating day, with a chance to meet some wonderful peers (including Colin Burns, John Thackera, Kelly Goto and Erik Spiekermann). I hope to write a blog about the day, and its issues for the BBC, over the next week or so, for the Guardian 'Comment is Free' website - watch this space. (Incidentally, all the clips in the presentation are available on YouTube, just keyword search the page titles. I've also been promised an AV clip of the session, which I'll also post here).

Prince of Prodigality

Just discovered that my long piece on Brian Morton's new critical biography of Prince made the cover of the Scottish Review of Books, a long overdue version of the London, New York and Boston reviews, edited by Sunday Herald colleagues Alan Taylor and Colin Waters. Quite happy with it, delighted at the prominence, but they seem to be a bit worried about net readers taking away from actual sales of the publication, so I can't give you a link to the piece. But I do have it here, in extended post below.

And for those of you so minded, here is the wee man in glorious action on YouTube, with another member of the R'n'B pantheon, Beyonce.

Incidentally, I discovered it when I saw the Review sitting in piles at Glasgow's new literary festival, Aye Write, where I attended two great events from Will Hutton (on the myth of an all-powerful China) and John Tusa (on the power of the arts).

True Mutations

Thrilled to find that my 2001 interview with the estimable left cyber-libertarian R.U.Sirius has made it to a new paperback out in the US, called True Mutations. I'm in there (talking about play) with many other highly (dis)reputable neophiliacs - indeed in my section, 'An Open Source for the Self', I am sandwiched in between Genesis P. Orridge, the late Robert Anton Wilson, Richard Metzger, Daniel Pinchbeck, Howard Bloom and D.J.Spooky. I have never felt so happy to be among such peers (though just slightly creeped out also).

R.U. is also a burgeoning podcast titan, with his shows on the Mondo Globo Network, which are feeding automatically to my iPod as I speak. His blog, Ten Zen Monkeys, is a superior entity also. Anything he does is thoroughly recommended - his personal mix of stoner diffuseness, and Frankfurt-school analytics, is quite irresistible.

The New Seriousness

Another Guardian Comment Is Free post from me - a bit impressionistic, subjective and not that analytical, about something maybe abroad in the culture, but certainly in my own life, called the New Seriousness. I agree with Acid Jazz's comments below - this isn't about abandoning playfulness, but deepening it, and making a more ethical use of the powerful interactive toys that suffuse our lives at the moment.