Play, Work, Labour: Concepts and Relations Arwid Lund Talk and discussion Monday, December 2, 17:00-19:00, University of Westminster Harrow Campus (Metropolitan Line, stop: Northwick Park) room A7.01 Registration at latest until Saturday, November 30, to [email protected] Arwid Lund Abstract Developing the concept of the playdrive, I contend that it has both a constructive side (when it merges with work in creating use values) and a destructive side (when it is just destroying use values). Regarding work and labour I trace the roots of the concepts in the works of Karl Marx and his claim that labour had a dual character containing a dialectical relation between concrete and abstract work under capitalism. In this I am being inspired by modern and contemporary interpretations that stress this distinction and I contend in contrast to Hannah Arendt – who distinguished work as the artistic creation of the hand, and labour as being the hard toil of the body – the importance of maintaining the dialectical relation between the concrete labours production of use values (that I will be calling work) and abstract labours production of value (that I will be calling labour). The importance of the distinction is however accentuated by the emergence of (concrete) work, in the form of commons-based peer production within the digital network. This work is taking up competition with capitalistically organized work. This work is being socially necessary without carrying exchange value – but could it therefore be called a kind of positive value production without the abstract obligation of changing equivalents? Or is it just the production of use value? Either way I contend that the distinction between work and labour can be useful for analytical reasons to understand contemporary capitalism. Peer production is of course not liberated from capitalistic mechanisms, (abstract) labour in the Marxian sense, but these are confined to the margins of the projects, financed by voluntary and popular donations. Because all of this we need to be able to describe more nuances between the work of peer production and capitalist labour (where the abstract labour, in a dialectical relation, is dominating and subsuming the concrete labour). We also have to take into account how the human playdrive interact with work/labour. The relation between play and work/labour will be investigated and after that I aim at constructing a model build on a scale of grades where I position the ideal types of Play, Work, and Labour on the scale: Left (Play), center (Work) and right (Labour). This model will help me to analyze and put into context concepts like playbour. It is possible to explain this relation between play and work/labour in the digital networks by distinguishing between playwork/workplay and playbour. Peer production is founded on the mix of play and (concrete) work. The position of playwork is near the ideal type of play, and workplay nearer the ideal type of (concrete) work. The relation of labour to play (playbour) is more difficult to define and understand. The human playdrive is defined as non-instrumental, labour under capitalism is essentially defined as instrumental to an alien interest. The position of playbour on the scale depends on who you ask. For the one doing the playbour it can be more about play than playwork (its ultimately alienated character makes the center category work more problematic because it could easily start to involve feelings of being exploited), but for the capitalist managing the crowdsourcing it is all about unpaid (abstract) labour, positioning it very near that ideal type. Playbour therefore contains a potential, but not necessary, class conflict. Finally cracking in the digital environment, and so called vandals in, Wikipedia, could be said to be engaged in a destructive way of play (with its position possible even nearer the ideal type of Play). *** Arwid Lund is a PhD-student in Library- and Information Science at the Department of ALM (Archives, Libraries and Museums) at University of Uppsala, Sweden. He is the author of three books in Swedish, and has worked as a librarian with digital publishing and digital repositories. He has also been active as a social movement activist during the nineties and the first decade of the new millennia. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Westminsters Communication and Media Research Institute, where he works on the topic of this talk funded by a Short Term Scientific Mission of the EU COST Action Dynamics of Virtual Work (see dynamicsofvirtualwork/). You can contact Arwid Lund at [email protected]
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 11:30:43 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015